


Longing

by fannishliss



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Biblical References, Blank Verse, Brainwashing, Brooklyn, Bucharest, Bucky Barnes's Plums, Canon Compliant, Daybreak, Dream Logic, Experimental Style, Homecoming, Internalized Homophobia, Longing, Lukin, M/M, Memories, Nine - Freeform, Period-Typical Homophobia, Poetry, Politics, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Prostitution, Reconciliation, Romanian, Sam Wilson Is a Good Bro, Seventeen - Freeform, Steve and Bucky's love will conquer all, T'Challa's bodyguards, Triggers, Wakandan tech, background Tony/Pepper, background Wanda/Vision, benign, bucky's journals, dante's inferno, disturbing imagery, freight car, furnace - Freeform, hydra does have tentacles, one - Freeform, prostitution is background not super explicit in this story, rusted, wanda's powers, Русский | Russian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-24
Updated: 2016-07-27
Packaged: 2018-06-10 08:51:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 15
Words: 30,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6949354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fannishliss/pseuds/fannishliss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Why Hydra chose those specific triggers words to lock down Bucky's brain, and how Steve and Wanda work to undo them.</p><p>This series uses experimental styles and shifting povs, so every chapter is a little different.... Moving from angst to the happy ending we so desperately need for them!!   THIS FIC IS NOW COMPLETE!!   </p><p>If you hated Bucky going into cryo, this is the fic that will fix it for you.  Totally canon compliant leading to the happy ending for everybody.  :D</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. the words

**Longing**.  
More than anything, he longed for his freedom.  He longed to be whole again.  He longed for the arm he’d lost, the memories he’d lost, the knowledge of who he’d been.  He longed for someone.  He couldn’t quite remember who it was.  Someone with soft yellow hair, just under his chin.  Someone with thin shoulders and a spine as straight as sheer will could make it.  The hollow place inside him gaped and ached, probing the tatters of his memory.  Longing defined him, his whole brain on fire with the need, the lack, everything he was desperate for and could never ever have, never again.  Yes, longing.  Longing.  Longing.    
  
  
**Rusted**.  
The grating doors that swung open and closed on creaking hinges, inexorable in their weight.  He could not rely on when they opened and shut, they just did. Hunger burned in his stomach, piss and shit spilled out of him onto the floor.  When he collapsed, exhausted, and closed his eyes to the bars and the filth and the killing solitude, he hoped it would be for the very last time.  But without fail (so far) he’d always awakened to the metallic scream as  neglected doors swung open, and his owners dragged him out again, to the chair, to be made fit again, honed again to their use. Rusted, a tool left out in the rain, in the darkness, damp and cold.  They didn’t care. He would do.  
  
  
**Seventeen**.  
His brain lit up at the prime, trying to fit it into some kind of pattern.  It stuck out.  It didn’t fit.  Age seventeen, a man was nearly a man, but not a man.  Not.  He was not.  Seventeen, it sounded important to him, something to do with beginnings.    He doubted there could ever again be a real beginning.  His brain wrestled with seventeen and couldn’t get a leg over.  The butterfly echo of a first kiss fled into the twilight as he gave up seventeen.    
  
  
**Daybreak**.  
The clear golden light spilled through. A glorious new world, sparkling and clean, reborn from the old — he had purpose, one purpose only — to usher in Hydra’s new order, the fire of brilliant sunshine sweeping over the earth, dispelling the darkness of chaos and disorder.  His allegiance, his skills, his talents, would be a small part in helping to shape this new world, the light of a new dawn.  
  
  
**Furnace**.  
And the chaff would be thrown into fire unquenchable. dross burned away till only purity remained.  Every whir of his mighty arm told him that weakness must be purged, and strength mercilessly forged.  Any distractions excised and consigned to the furnace.     
  
  
**Nine**.  
Someone shouting no, no, no — but no.  It was only a number.  Three times three, an orderly box of  three perfect rows.  Relax and let everything fall into place.  
  
  
**Benign**.  
Harmless. Safe.  The test came back clean.  
   
  
**Homecoming**.  
Something golden just under his chin… gone…  
  
  
**One**.  
Monolithic, unstoppable.  
  
  
**Freight Car.**  
For one moment, in a flash, everything was clear — the shield, the shot, the railing, Steve’s face, Steve’s hand reaching for him, Steve calling his name, and the rusted iron tore free, the numbers spun backward, one nine seventeen, and the endless fall down into ice was the final homecoming, the old free world consigned to the furnace, a clear and empty daybreak for the new. **LONGING** wiped him clean, lax, benign.

  
  
_“Ready to comply.”_


	2. Freight Car

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A way to undo Bucky's triggers.

  
  
James Buchanan Barnes, the Winter Soldier, stood in his glass coffin, peaceful and serene, reminding Steve of nothing so much as Snow White.  He glanced at Wanda, hoping she hadn’t picked up on his thoughts, but trying not to care if she had.  She was willing to try to help Bucky, and Steve had no way to repay her, now that he was on the run, disavowed, little better than a common fugitive.  
  
Wanda’s attention was turned to the man behind the glass.  Her head tilted slightly to the side and her hand drifted toward the glass. Steve watched with a little apprehension for the red spark of her eldritch powers — he remembered their effects all too well.    
  
T’Challa reached out to catch Wanda’s hand gently before she touched the glass.  
  
“The surface is insulated, but still very cold,” T’Challa explained.  “The serum in his body speeds his metabolism to ward off the effects of cold well below the freezing temperature of carbon dioxide.”  
  
“Dry ice,” Steve said, remembering his high school chemistry.  Steve had a terrible attendance record, missing more days than he was able to attend, but he managed to scrape by with Bucky’s help, and Bucky had taken all the science and math their school had to offer.  
  
T’Challa nodded.   “Our scientists are using a supercooled combination of noble gases to combat the effects of the serum, without freezing him solid. The file you gave me referred to cryogenesis, but their procedure was really quite crude.”  
  
“I appreciate all you’ve done for him,” Steve said, not wanting to think too much about the details of everything Hydra had done to Bucky.  They were gone, hopefully for good, and the book Zemo had used to trigger Bucky was now in Steve’s hands. “Thank you.”  
  
“Leading Wakanda out of the shadows must be done with the utmost care,” T’Challa answered, shaking Steve’s hand.  “You have a special gift for distilling complex ethical problems into their core components.  While you live here, I ask nothing more than that you learn our history and get to know our people.  As Wakanda emerges onto the world scene, I welcome your point of view.”  
  
“I don’t know that much about today’s world,” Steve demurred.  “It’s all such a mess.  Not that that’s anything new.”  
  
“Human beings, our drives and motives, are messy, without a doubt,” T’Challa agreed.  “But as a people, we do move forward.  I truly believe that the time is now for Wakanda to take our place in the world, and you will be a part of that.”  
  
“If you think I can help, I’ll do all I can,” Steve said.    
  
“That is all anyone can ask,” T’Challa answered.     
  
“I can almost hear him dreaming,” Wanda said, her hand still dancing near the surface of the glass.   “Very slow, very quiet.  He dreams of you, Captain.”  
  
Steve shuddered.  “Peaceful dreams, I hope,” he said.  
  
“No,” she said, shaking her head.  “Not peaceful.”  
  
Bucky’s features rested, still and serene behind the glass, but Wanda could see inside people’s heads, so Steve had to believe her.  
  
“Maybe we can do something about that,” Steve suggested.  
  
“That is our hope,” T’Challa agreed.   “Our scientists have concluded that even if Sergeant Barnes were somehow triggered now, he would not be able to break free.  The cold is simply too deep.”  
  
“So Wanda is okayed to look inside his head,” Steve said.    
  
“You trust me,” Wanda said, and Steve heard the shadow of a doubt.  
  
“Yes,” he said, without hesitation.  She was on his team. He knew she would do her best.  
  
“Then I will do it,” Wanda answered, reaching her hand out to him.   She still hadn’t redone her nails since everything had happened. but with her hands restrained in a straitjacket at the Raft, they hadn’t gotten any more chipped than the last time he’d seen her.    Her tarnished silver rings adorned her fingers, gifts from the twin she’d lost, mourning rings.    
  
“Right now?” Steve said.  
  
“Yes,” Wanda said.  
  
T’Challa gracefully lifted one shoulder.    
  
Steve took Wanda’s hand …  
  
…    
  
and the train was rounding a bend on the side of a mountain.  Bucky had taken up the shield, and a Hydra goon in a weaponized suit was drawing a bead on him.  
  
Agony tore through Steve as he realized how many times Hydra must have used the phrase “freight car” to shut down Bucky’s free will.  The Wakandans had determined that the series of trigger words were not at all random; they were specifically designed to activate different areas of Bucky’s brain, bringing every aspect of his thought processes under Hydra’s control.   The moment when he’d fallen from the freight car was the capstone on his enslavement, the final key to it, and the first piece that needed to be unravelled.    
  
So Steve sprang, quicker than thought.  How many times had he rehearsed this scene in his head, a thousand, ten thousand times? He’d analyzed and reanalyzed every angle, running the scene over and over again in his perfected tactical memory.  He’d never found a way to stop the goon from firing, and no way to block the bolt without getting vaporized in the process, since Bucky was holding the shield.  The shield would block the deadly blue bolt but not without knocking  Bucky through the gaping hole in the side of the freight car. Steve had only one chance, and he took it. He vaulted with all his might, reaching the edge of the shield with his fingertips just as their attacker fired, changing the angle of Bucky’s trajectory just enough to stop him from plunging out of the torn side of the freight car.    
  
Steve landed heavily on top of Bucky, skidding across the floor of the freight car right up to the whistling edge of the chasm.  Rolling, he flung the shield and took down the goon — but this time, Bucky was still safe inside the train, warm and alive underneath him.    
  
“Steve,” Bucky said, brow wrinkled in confusion.  “I don’t… did it really… go this way?” His eyes were so hopeless and dark, it broke Steve’s heart. 

  
“It doesn’t matter, Buck,” Steve said.  “I gotcha now, I promise.”  
  
“Okay,” Bucky said, and his brow cleared. …  
  
…  
  
And Steve was out again, holding Wanda’s hand.    
  
“It worked, I think,” she said.    
  
“We need to know for sure,” Steve said.  
  
“We can easily scan his brain for reactivity to the trigger,” T’Challa said.  “But what happened? You only closed your eyes for a moment.”  
  
“I didn’t let him fall,” Steve said, trying to catch his breath, and he realized he was crying.  
  
Wanda squeezed his hand and Steve held on, Bucky’s face still clear behind the glass, blurred now by Steve’s tears. 


	3. One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wanda helps undo the next trigger.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is some nasty graphic imagery in this chapter. Tentacles are, after all, Hydra canon.

The darkness inside his head is so deep.    
  
Not an ordinary darkness. Not merely an absence of light. Not a cloudy night of the soul, unlit by guiding stars.  
  
No. A thick, oily, oppressive darkness, stinking of shit and terror.  A darkness sharp as knives, shards, fangs, scalpels, bullets.  A darkness of cruel, grabbing hands, restraints, rough ropes, manacles.  The night of the coffin, the charnel house, the soul-killing blackness of hell.    
  
My captain asked me to help him.  The darkness in my captain’s eyes, the pain, was empathy, guilt, longing.    
  
We journeyed into his head and fought the loss first.  I know loss from the depths of my own heart— the loss of my family, my home, my country, my brother.  I lost everything.  I know that longing in my captain’s eyes.    
  
But his eyes were never so dark as the infernal pit inside his friend.    
  
So I help them, just as the captain helped me.  Hydra locked me in a box, rewrote my body’s script beyond cell-deep, changed me utterly.  The captain trusted me, gave me a new home, protected me. They locked me up again, wound me round in the strait jacket, locked me up again in one more box, but he came back for me.  Sam and the archer told me he would come, and he did. He will never leave his friend alone in the darkness, and that is why I help. For my team, my new family, I can do no less.    
  
Sitting beside him, keeping watch, I wait for his triggers to bob to the surface of his somnolent mind.  The fall from the train, the last seal, we undid first.   Their longings are twins, sharp and sore.  I had never known a minute of life without my brother… without him, a crucial part of me is undone, unravelled.  I knew the bond of a brother’s love, the certainty of it.  I saw my captain leap, unstoppable, having rehearsed this precious rescue a thousand thousand times.  He made it look like a dance, so pure, the desperation of it almost disguised by sheer necessity. He saves his friend because there is no other choice.  Having lost him once, he will not lose him again. What would I have done, or undone, what would I risk, or yield up, if there came a chance to save my brother?  Anything, everything.  Something inside me still is bleeding. That is why I am here, dredging the tips of my fingers through this horrible darkness.  
  
Under the surface, past the oily scum, writhe the tentacles of Hydra.  Somewhere, down in the depths, a naked skull grins with pure malevolence.  This is a world untouched by light, by hope, by possibility.    
  
This is a world they built for him.  This is the world they built him for.  They devised him as a cog in their nasty world machine, grafting the killer arm onto his side, anchoring it deep in his body with hooks he mustn’t dare think about; bludgeoning his brain with a crown of blue thorns, copper wires dredging out every inkling of will.  
  
I feel the tentacles, slithering, probing his body for entrance, winding around his heart as it struggles to beat.  
  
Beat, beat, the tentacles take it up and make it their own.  
  
Even his thoughts succumb.  _Heil! Heil!_ they throb, as blue copper lightning storms through his mind.    
  
Into his lungs sinks the turgid air.  
  
Down his throat, the tentacles swell his stomach with a slurry that keeps him this side of death.    
  
Up through his anus, into his bowels, a tentacle breaches to void him.  
  
Tentacles of iron encage his penis, piercing him, empty him into a bag.  Tentacles thread through his testicles, threatening, hostage to the will of Hydra.  
  
Through it all he is aware: the curse of the serum heightening his awareness, he hears the slithering, feels it crawling, probing, caressing, his tongue helpless not to taste, nostrils flooded, brain overwhelmed.  heil  
  
HEIL  
  
**HEIL**  
  
no escape  
  
no hope even to cut off one  
  
one  
  
one ( _no escape, you are part of us, we are one now_ )  
  
one  
  
ONE  
  
**ONE**  
  
I pull back into myself, shuddering, gasping.  
  
My captain is there, always close by.  He doesn’t have to ask.  Every line of his body asks me, what can I do, what do we do, how do we undo it, save him, save him!!  
  
I have to take a breath. The miracle of air untainted by that awful foulness cleanses my lungs like the first breath of creation.    
  
And there it is, there is the answer.    
  
I hold out my hand to the captain and without hesitation he takes it.  That big hand enwraps mine, so strong, the hand that had finally saved his friend from falling, ready to do whatever it takes to save him, again and again, until every last binding is cut away.    
  
I feel him recoil as he stands on the shore, reluctant to breathe in the choking air, blinking against the stygian blackness that stymies sight.    
  
“Shine,” I whisper, and despite the horrible bleakness, he understands me.    
  
“Fiat lux,” he echoes, squares his broad shoulders and lifts his chin, and he shines.    
  
Dimly at first, he grows brighter.    
  
“This is a dream,” he whispers.    
  
“Dream bright as you can,” I urge him.  
  
In the days since I became an Avenger, I have seen many minds.  My Hydra masters trained me to warp, and it was easy then, because everyone in Hydra was already warped.  After I was freed, and bereaved, I sought comfort from the lighter thoughts that danced around the minds I brushed past.    
  
With my team mates, I am encouraged to accustom them to my mental touch.  Team mates are not twins, but we must know each other, very well.    
  
I know the artist inside my captain, the clarity of his memory, the brilliance of his visions.  I know he can make-believe light for his friend, illuminate and dispel the depths of this gloomy hell.     
  
Slowly, the shore where he stands gains ground, becomes solid. The murky ooze that laps against it clears, tentacles searching and retreating, stung by a brightness they have never known.  
  
Overhead, storm clouds boil.  
  
The waves roil, tentacles pulling back and back.  
  
The depths rise up, and the grinning skull freezes in the shimmering light, a deadened rictus.  
  
My captain shines like the sun, breaking upon the waves with the might of his will.  The awful unity of that monstrous world is cloven in twain, and a naked man is spat upon the shore, choking, coughing, twitching, breathing, one-armed, free.    
  
He looks up, eyes clear, so blue in the new light.  
  
My captain reaches down and helps him up, pulls him close and holds him tight.    
  
They hold each other, love pouring out of them, brighter than the sun, the world around them fresh and clean and new. They are one, the old one undone.    
  
I leave them to dream it together as long as I can; maybe an eternity… who can measure these things?  
  
The tears are still wet when we open our eyes, and the dark-haired man is still dreaming in his casket, quiet and slow.    
  
  
  
  
  
 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bucky's bodily integrity is violated by tentacles controlled by Hydra. Partly inspired by H. R. Giger.


	4. Homecoming

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve has dreams of his own.

  
  
Steve lay in his bedroom in the Wakandan palace.  The suite Tony had prepared for him in the Avengers’ Tower had felt too big, too opulent, full of tech he didn’t want and room he didn’t need.  Here in Wakanda, things were simpler and Steve liked it that way.  
  
His suite had a comfortable sitting room with nice view of the jungle outside.  (Steve was slowly coming to realize that what looked like a tangle of untamed wilderness was actually a carefully cultivated cornucopia yielding food, pharmaceuticals, fibers, even complex chemicals.)  The Wakandans truly had locked themselves away in a paradise of their own devising.  Steve hoped his actions hadn’t ruined their coming out party for the world.  Besides the sitting room there was a small kitchenette, a bedroom and a bath.  It was much more like quarters at the Avengers training facility and much more to Steve’s liking.     
  
Now, he was lying in darkness, thinking about Bucky. To be fair, he was never not thinking about Bucky.  But in the darkness, there was nothing to distract him.    
  
Wanda had helped Steve unlock two of Bucky’s triggers so far.  Steve pictured Hydra reading to Bucky from long lists of Russian words and ranking them by how much his brain responded.  Even without the MRIs and brain scans of this miraculous future, Steve could understand how they might have done it using something as straight forward as a lie detector.  By a combination of uttering the words and jolting his brain with electricity, added to the terrible panoply of tortures they put him through, they had scarred his brain so deeply with the trigger words that it was impossible for Bucky to resist.  Careful, intensive therapy might have been able to undo the harm that had been done, but it might have taken years, if it ever worked at all.    
  
Wanda, with her powers, was able to replace Hydra’s work with a new reality inside Bucky’s head, undoing the terrible associations and pathways they had carved into Bucky’s brain.  In only a few days, she had allowed Steve to prevent Bucky’s fall from the train, changing the outcome of the worst moment of Steve’s entire life, at least in Bucky’s head.  Reliving the train incident, allowing it to play out differently, allowed Bucky’s brain to heal and helped his mind get past the horrors Hydra had ingrained into the words.    
  
Wanda had been pretty shaken up by the awful images Hydra had attached to the word One in Bucky’s mind.  Steve had seen the tentacles as they shrank away, but she wouldn’t show him how bad it had been.  Steve was just relieved that he was able to help Bucky’s mind build a new association with the idea of One — the complete dedication Steve felt for his best friend.  Steve would hold onto Bucky forever: he would never let him go.  
  
Steve knew his feelings for Bucky ran deep.  He had always loved Bucky, and he had held up that love to a sacred standard.  They had grown up in a different time, and Steve had kept celibate according to the dictates of his religion.   Nowadays, times had changed.  Steve mourned for Bucky for almost two years, then when he reappeared, he pined for him, plain and simple.  He had to face the fact that he loved Bucky as more than a friend.  Truthfully, Bucky had always been everything to Steve.  Nothing and no one had ever meant as much to him, not even —  he had to admit it —not even Peggy.  Beautiful and brilliant, Peggy was amazing, and Steve was honored to spend time with her, but they were fighting a war, and their love had never really had a chance to flower.  Steve could have had a future with her, he thought, but now, his only thoughts for the future were of Bucky.  He wanted Bucky secure, and whole, and free, but in his private thoughts, Steve wanted Bucky by his side, forever.    
  
He thought all this on his bed, staring out at the Wakandan night.  It seemed  miraculous that Wanda had already helped them break two of Bucky’s triggers.  The next trigger in line was Homecoming, and Steve lay there pondering the word, building up scenarios in his mind and making each one more wonderful than the next.    
  
Wanda met Steve for coffee in the afternoon.    
  
“I’m a little nervous about the next trigger,” she admitted.  “‘One’ was really bad.”  
  
“Take as much time as you need,” Steve said. “I’m so grateful to you for helping Bucky, but I don’t want to take advantage of you.  Bucky wanted to be sure it would be safe for him to wake up, and you’ve helped so much already.”  
  
“I want to wait,” Wanda admitted.  “He dreams very slowly.  I’ll watch for the triggers while he dreams and make sure the new imagery we’ve planted has helped him.”  
  
Steve was impatient, but he knew that she was right.  “He went to sleep on purpose, so that we could be as thorough as possible.”  
  
“I will see this through until the end,” Wanda promised.    
  
That night, Steve dreamed of homecomings.  
  
*  
Steve dreamed of their childhood, the little, rundown apartment where he lived with his ma, and the crowded row house where Bucky lived with his parents and three little sisters.  He dreamed of the peacefulness of Sarah’s plain little rooms, and the hubbub of the Barneses' as they laughed and shouted and the little ones chased each other through the rooms.  Every day after school, they took turns visiting one another.  Sarah was often still at work, so Steve’s place was a good place to do homework and Bucky would help Steve catch up with things he’d missed.  At Bucky’s house, it was noisy but Bucky’s mother always made sure Steve had a place at their table.  As hard as things got, Steve always had Bucky, and Steve hoped Bucky remembered that even though Steve didn’t have much to offer in those days, everything Steve had was Bucky’s for the taking.    
  
*  
  
After Bucky left for Basic, Steve dreamed of his homecoming every night. Bucky wrote to tell him how well things were going, and Steve was floored when Bucky showed up looking swell in his new uniform, already a sergeant!  Their next reunion did not come again until Steve pulled Bucky off Zola’s table, but in Steve’s dream, he imagined the two of them marching side by side, through the street of New York in a victory parade.  He dreamed about the festivities of peace, the ticker tape parades he saw in the newsreels, when peace came at last after Steve went down in the Arctic.  Steve had seen the famous photograph of the sailor kissing the woman, and in his heart of hearts he dreamed of kissing Bucky like that, full on the mouth, right there in the street for everyone to see.  After all they suffered, all they sacrificed, they had more than earned it.    
  
*  
  
Steve’s dreams of Bucky were all-encompassing.  He dreamed of Bucky as a kid, when they’d first met, his goofy smile that lit Steve up inside.  He dreamed of Bucky as a teenager, dancing with the girls and making them swoon.  And he dreamed of their place together on Montague street, a little two-room cold water flat carved out of a rundown brownstone, where they lived in each other’s pockets for more than five years.  Living there with Bucky, going to art school, taking odd jobs when he wasn’t sick — those were the best years of Steve’s life.  Bucky came home from his job at his dad’s garage, covered in grease, tips from old ladies filling out his pockets.  They weren’t rolling in dough, but they had enough to go to the pictures or out to see the Dodgers or to take the train to Coney Island every so often.  It was a fine life for a pair of young bachelors.  Bucky had enough pocket change to treat his never ending line of girls to soda pops at the dance halls, and that was all right.  Steve loved Bucky enough to wish him only the best.    
  
After the helicarriers, Steve dreamed of the Winter Soldier.  He dreamed of Bucky’s powerful, fluid moves, the way he fought harder than almost anyone Steve had ever gone up against, and Steve often sparred with Thor. Steve dreamed of Bucky’s troubled eyes, dark with confusion and anger.  Steve dreamed of that moment when Bucky’s fist froze in the air, the moment when Bucky failed to carry out his mission, and Steve knew that Bucky remembered him.    
  
Steve waited for Bucky and searched for him and longed for him.  He dreamed and dreamed of Bucky’s homecoming.  He couldn’t understand how Hydra had twisted “Homecoming” into a trigger.     
  
He soon found out.  
  
*  
  
Bucky wandered a vacant, ashen, New York, its skyscrapers broken and toppled, its bridges torn in half, Lady Liberty headless, tilted on her plinth.  Bucky found his family’s old town house, doors and windows broken and empty, garbage strewn across the floors, his sisters’ belonging scattered and ruined. The dance halls Bucky had frequented were empty shells.   Bucky ran to their place on Montague, only to find it burned out, trailing with dead weeds.    
  
_[“Shouldn’t I go to him?” Steve asked Wanda._  
  
_“Wait,” she said. “Not yet.”]_  
  
*  
  
Bucky returned to the Hydra base, hollowed out but somehow full of dread. His mission had gone without a hitch.  He knew his record was impeccable, and yet his successes gave him no sense of pride.  He killed people, to the glory of Hydra, and recovered the things his superiors had demanded.  He didn’t know the people or what the things were; it was not his purpose to know, merely to follow orders.  
  
Hydra operatives detected him as he neared the base, and came to escort him.  They flanked him, weapons ready, as he was taken to be debriefed.  He lay back in the chair, breathing hard and terrified of the wipe, unable to do anything but comply.    
  
_[“Motherfuckers,” Steve swore, as Hydra tore into the brain of his best friend. “Now?_  
  
_“Not yet,” Wanda said.]_  
  
*  
  
Bucky stood on a street in Bucharest.  The vendors had a fresh batch of plums, the first of the season.  How sweet and cold they would taste after only a few hours in the icebox, Bucky knew.  
  
_[“Now,” Wanda said, and pushed Steve into the scene.]_  
  
Bucky glanced across the street to the newsstand where he’d bought papers once or twice.  He couldn’t risk becoming too familiar to the seller.    
  
“Buy enough for both of us,” Steve said, over Bucky’s right shoulder.    
  
Bucky ducked his head, long hair falling across his face. Letting the plums drop back into the bin, he turned away from Steve and started to stride away.    
  
“Please,” Steve said, catching his right arm, “Bucky, don’t go.  You know me, I know you do.”  
  
“Nu,” Bucky replied, pulling away.   “Eu nu vorbesc limba engleză.”  
  
“Te implor,” Steve said.  “vorbește-mi.”  
  
Bucky startled and looked back at Steve.  “When did you learn Romanian?” he asked in English.  
  
“That’s not important.  Just please, let me let me talk to you,” Steve begged.  
  
Bucky stared at Steve, and something seemed to transpire inside his mind.  
  
“Steve,” he said. “Am I dreaming?”  
  
_[“What do I tell him?” Steve demanded._  
  
_“The truth,” Wanda said.]_  
  
“Bucky, listen,” Steve urged.  “I know it sounds crazy, but just let me buy you these plums and go back with you to your place.  It’ll all make sense later.”  
  
“Okay,” Bucky said, still a little wary.     
  
Steve sagged with relief, and in a heartbeat, they were back in Bucky’s drab little room.    
  
Bucky stood with his back to the wall, watching Steve, but this time, no commandos were about to crash through the walls.    
  
Steve brought out the bag of plums, rinsed them, and began to slice the succulent stone fruit onto a plate. The purple juice welled out, looking delicious.     
  
Steve carried the plate over to Bucky’s bed and sat down, placing it between them.    
  
“How long you been living here, Buck?” Steve asked.  
  
“A while,” Bucky said.    
  
“Can’t stay long in any one place, I guess,” Steve said.    
  
“No,” Bucky said, dropping his chin.  
  
“You could stay with me,” Steve said.  
  
“No,” Bucky denied.  
  
“Why not?” Steve said. “All the plums you can eat.”  
  
Bucky huffed. “I’m doing all right.”  
  
“I miss you,” Steve said, trying to catch Bucky’s gaze.  
  
“I miss you too,” Bucky whispered.    
  
“Then, come home with me,” Steve insisted.  
  
“It’s not that simple,” Bucky said.    
  
Flashes of the desolation Hydra implanted in Bucky’s mind began to flip like a slideshow onto the walls around them.  
  
Steve’s eye caught on the plate of plums, so richly purple and juicy.  He could even smell them.  They seemed so much more real than anything else in Bucky’s flat, especially the gray images of loss that Hydra had painted into Bucky’s mind.  
  
“Taste,” Steve said, lifting a slice of plum.      
  
Bucky frowned, but then, his lips parted, and Steve slipped the bite of plum into Bucky’s mouth.    
  
“You too,” Bucky said, feeding Steve a slice of the plum.  The taut flesh of the plum burst between his teeth as he bit, sweet and slightly tart.    
  
“It’s good,” Steve said.    
  
“It is good,” Bucky agreed, and laughed.    
  
In the blink of an eye, they were back in Brooklyn, in one of Steve’s dreams of Bucky’s homecoming.    
  
Steve had bought the place on Montague, the whole damn building.  He’d had the top two floors renovated, and even though he hadn’t lived there long, it was perfect, everything just the way he knew Bucky would like, simple furnishings, pictures on the walls, sunlight spilling through the windows.    
  
“Stevie, where are we?” Bucky asked.    
  
“Home,” Steve said.  “We’re together.  We’re home.”  
  
“Yeah,” Bucky said, a relieved exhalation at the perfect homecoming.  


	5. Benign

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Doublespeak and the word "Benign"

  
  
Without Wakandan help, Steve would never have been able to break his friends out of the Raft.     
  
“But you signed the Accords that put them there,” Steve said to T’Challa; as always, Steve was too stubborn for his own good.  
  
“I did,” T’Challa agreed.  
  
Steve was used to more of a fight.  After a moment, when T’Challa said no more, Steve said, “Thank you, for helping us.”  
  
“You are welcome,” T’Challa said.  “Come, let me introduce you to two of my Dora Milaje, who will lead the operation.”  
  
Steve managed to shake the hands of the two women. They were tall, powerful, quiet and serious, and Steve was too impressed by them to really speak. They flew him to the Raft in their undetectable jet, broke the codes that brought it to the surface, and opened the cell doors.  Steve just knocked out the guards and grinned at his friends.    
  
Clint and Scott stayed only a few days in the kingdom. Both Clint and Scott had loved ones to worry about, and Steve knew better than to ask them about their plans. Scott was used to running under the radar, but Clint had more experience at leading a secret life.  Steve thanked them for their help and wished them both the best of luck.  According to the news, the Black Widow hadn’t been spotted since the battle at the airport, so Steve thought she might help them, but he didn’t know anything for sure, and it was probably better that way.  
  
Wanda wanted to stay, not just to help Bucky, but she also wanted to avoid putting the Vision into a bad position with Tony.  They had shared a moment of understanding during the battle, and though she missed him, she felt it was better to let matters rest for a while.    
  
Sam didn’t have a partner or kids, but he did have family who cared about him.  Still, he didn’t seriously consider leaving.  “You think I’m passing up the chance to chill in Wakanda for a while? You got another think coming!”  
  
Sam was a great deal more at ease around T’Challa’s bodyguards than Steve was, completely respectful while at the same conveying his admiration.  
  
“You shouldn’t flirt with them!” Steve hissed at Sam.  “In the old days they might have become the King’s wives!”  
  
“Those were the old days,” Sam said.  “And I’m not flirting, I’m just being honest.”  
  
Steve blushed too hard to be honest.  But he did try to let them know that he was grateful.  The two ladies who had helped him rescue his friends accepted his thanks with modest smiles and went on their way.    
  
When he wasn’t appreciating the King’s Bodyguards, Sam spent his time exploring the kingdom.  
  
“Steve, man, this is the most advanced society on earth!  and you keep yourself all cooped up in the palace!  it’s a crime!”     
  
Steve had to admit Sam was right, as usual, but he couldn’t tear himself away from Bucky, even though his friend was in stasis.  
  
“I promise I’ll come out with you at some point,” Steve said.  “I just, I gotta stay focused on Bucky.”  
  
Sam rolled his eyes.  “Bucky’s in stasis.  He’s not about to expire.”  
  
Steve pursed his lips.  Sam had heard it all a thousand times already.  “We’re trying to find a way into the next trigger,” Steve explained.  “Benign.”  
  
Sam’s eyebrows shot up.  “Daniel Patrick Moynihan,” he murmured.    
  
Steve vaguely recognized the name of a politician.  
  
“He was a senator.  Back in the early seventies, he advised the government to stop trying to take action on racial inequality, and he coined the term ‘benign neglect.’”  
  
“Sounds like bullshit,” Steve said, frowning.  
  
“Oh, it was, it was,” Sam said.  “Didn’t stop people from buying into it, though.  Folks still trying to argue that programs like Headstart just ‘created dependency’ in black neighborhoods.”  
  
“How was curtailing needed programs in any way benign,” Steve said.    
  
Sam shook his head.  “You know, for years, the right used your image to prop up their conservative ideals.”  
  
“They didn’t know a damn thing about me or the way I was raised,” Steve said.  “They didn’t want to know, so they never asked.”  
  
“The best books about you and the Howlies are all by college professor types, who are nowadays dismissed as ‘intellectual elites.’”  
  
“Don’t get me started,” Steve said.  “Did they forget that Jefferson founded a university?”  
  
“They don’t care about facts,” Sam said, “only sound bites.”  
  
“So, benign — you think it’s Hydra doublespeak, twisting the word around to mean the opposite of what it is?” Steve asked.  
  
Sam shrugged.  “Wanda’s the one looking inside your pal’s head, not me.”  
  
“Once he’s back to normal, Sam, I promise you’ll like him.” Steve had already apologized to Sam so many times for Bucky, for destroying Sam’s car, tearing off his wing, throwing him across a room by his face, not to mention how many times Steve’s devotion to Bucky had turned Sam’s life upside down (case in point).    
  
“Steve, I know Wanda’s good, but man, ain’t nobody that good.  You gotta be prepared for the fact that seventy years of being Hydra’s tool isn’t something you just get over.”  
  
“Once we get past the triggers, then he can work out the rest,” Steve insisted.    
  
“You never cease to amaze,” Sam said.  He gave Steve a few good swats to the shoulder and took off, many more amazing Wakandan sights to see.    
  
It took Wanda several days to get a good understanding of what Benign had come to mean inside Bucky’s head.    
  
“This is going to be difficult for you,” she warned Steve.  
  
“I understand,” he said.    
  
Wanda took Steve’s hand.    
  
*  
  
Bucky was bleeding, he was cold, he was dizzy and he was terrified.  He was in shock. They were dragging him.    
  
“My arm,” he cried, words slurring.  “Help, it hurts, my arm.”  
  
The soldiers did not answer, continuing to drag him through the snow like a sack of rocks, until consciousness faded again.    
  
[ _“That was after he fell,” Steve said.  “I thought we undid that.”_  
  
_“No,” Wanda said.  “We only undid the part on the freight car._ ]  
  
*  
  
Bucky lay in a cell where they had tossed him. His left arm was in shreds, broken off just above the elbow, but strangely enough, it seemed to be healing.  The bleeding had stopped and the wound was clean.  Surely it should have been infected.    
  
Bucky waited for food or at least water, but it never came.  Finally, when he was too weak to move, someone came.    
  
Bucky’s throat was too dry to speak but the man didn’t seem to care.  He picked up Bucky’s left arm and examined it dispassionately, ignoring the pain his actions caused.  The wound had begun to heal over, despite how badly he’d been mistreated.    
  
That afternoon, someone slid a plate of food and some water into Bucky’s cell.  After that, he was fed sporadically, just enough to keep him alive.    
  
[ _“They’re treating him like an animal,” Steve said._  
  
_“Worse,” Wanda said, and Steve realized, she herself had been kept in a similar cell._  
  
_“I’m so sorry,” Steve said._  
  
_“That which does not kill you… “ Wanda said, evenly.  “Hydra only cares about making its weapons stronger.”_ ]  
  
  
*  
  
Bucky was on the table.  “No— no!” he tried to scream, but they ignored him.  The saw bit into his shoulder, removing what was left of his arm.  He passed out from the pain, but woke again as they drilled into the scapula to attach the socket.  The vibrations of the drill rattled his whole body, but his throat was too torn by screams by this point to make a sound. The operation went on.  
  
[ _“None of this is benign,” Steve seethed._  
  
_Wanda didn’t argue._ ]  
  
*    
  
They stopped feeding him again.  When he was too weak to fight, they attached the arm.  He still managed to strangle one technician with his new metal hand before they managed to sedate him — the only sedation he received throughout the entire procedure, even when they wired it into his nervous system.    
  
Once they had finished attaching the arm, they could only come near him when he was nearly dead from starvation.  That was when they stowed him away in cryofreeze, until they had a useable chair.    
  
[ _“How is this benign?” Steve demanded._  
  
_“Now it gets worse,” Wanda said._ ]  
  
*  
  
They dragged his limp body out of the tube and straight to the chair.  The clamps were fastened around his wrists and ankles.  The crown dropped down around his head.    
  
No one asked him anything, they just turned the knobs until he couldn’t scream any more.    
  
[ _Steve could only sob, as he watched his best friend’s destruction._ ]  
  
“  
  
He remembered nothing.  He knew nothing.  He wanted nothing.  He was blank and empty. They were ready to begin.    
  
“The fist of Hydra is the first line of defense against chaos. The fist of Hydra serves justice to the enemies of humanity.   Hydra brings peace.  Hydra brings order.  Hell Hydra.”  
  
He could see the fist. It moved when he thought about it.  The fist would bring justice and peace and order. That seemed good.   He didn’t know what Hydra was, but Heil Hydra sounded like something they wanted him to say, so he tried to say it.  His mouth was lazy from not speaking.  “Huh.  Huh.” He tried, but they didn’t seem to care.  They just started over.    
  
“The fist of Hydra is the first line of defense against chaos. The fist of Hydra serves justice to the enemies of humanity.   Hydra brings peace.  Hydra brings order.  Heil Hydra.”  
  
It didn’t even take hundreds of repetitions for his brain to accept the statements. Empty as he was, they became his only truth.  Hydra, justice, peace, order, defense against chaos, heil Hydra.   He soaked it in.    
  
After several days, something inside him changed.  He was no longer quite so empty.  Something inside him fought back. He could not say Heil Hydra anymore.  They noticed.  They didn’t need to ask.  They wiped him again.    
  
After that, they wiped him early and often.    
  
_[Steve wept._ ]  
  
*  
  
“When can I intervene?” Steve begged Wanda.  “Please, let me help him.”  
  
“Not yet,” Wanda said.  
  
*  
  
Lukin was Hydra, but he was also Russian.  He saw how Bucky resurfaced in the time between wipes.  He changed the protocols, and Bucky began to awaken.  It was Lukin who wrote the red book, hoping to hold a key to the Soldier that no one else even knew about.    
  
He read the words and watched Bucky react.  He saw how Bucky flinched at the word “benign.” It made him laugh.    
  
“Decadent young American,” Lukin accused.  “You will be young forever, forever clean and new in the service of Hydra. What has Hydra done to you that is so wrong? You are alive, are you not? You are healthy and strong, with a perfect arm to the glory of Mother Russia.  What do you have to complain about? Nothing.  Your life has meaning and purpose, thanks to Hydra.  Listen to the meaning of this word, benign: gentle, mild, and of a character that does not threaten health or life.  Hydra has not threatened your health or life, we have only made you stronger.  You topple our enemies to bring order and peace to the world, what could be more gentle and mild?”  
  
The Soldier could not answer.  His mind was blank, a slate upon which only Hydra had written.  The word benign sank like a stone into his empty mind, lodging itself in the depths of his unconscious.  Gentle, mild and benign: the fist of Hydra.    
  
*  
  
“Please,” Steve said.  “Where do I begin?”     
  
“Everywhere,” Wanda said.  “You had to see it all to understand the scope of it.  Hydra made him believe that their treatment of him was right and good.  Now is your chance to undo it all.”  
  
“Oh, thank God,” Steve said, as she pushed him into action.  
  
===  
  
Lukin was shouting and waving a red book with a star on the cover.  
  
“Decadent young American,” Lukin shouted.  The Soldier waited at parade rest, wondering if there would be a test.    
  
A man came bursting in and punched Lukin right in the face.  The man grabbed the red book and tore it in two with his bare hands, then snatched up the pieces and tore them again and again, till only tiny pieces remained.    
  
“Bucky — I’m getting you out of here.”     
  
“Who the hell is Bucky?” the Soldier asked, mildly.  
  
The man laughed, tears streaming down his face.    
  
*  
  
He remembered nothing.  He knew nothing.  He was blank and empty. They were ready to begin.    
  
“The fist of Hydra …”  
  
The voice, on a tape, ran down and went silent.  
  
He waited, patient, to see what would happen.  A man came in, with bright shiny hair and sad eyes.  
  
“Your name is Bucky Barnes, you’re my best friend, and I’m never going to leave you.”  
  
Bucky.  It sounded all right. The blond man seemed like a good best friend.    
  
  
*  
  
“Touch me again, you bastards,” Bucky raged, weak as a kitten, as they dragged him toward some new contraption.    
  
“Bucky, it’s me,” Steve said.  “I’m getting you out of here.”  
  
He’d managed to strangle one technician, but Steve fought like a fury, and they toppled like a house of cards.    Bucky watched, not sure why it was so satisfying as Steve pounded the chair and the tank into shapeless piles of rubble.    
  
*  
  
“No— no!” Bucky tried to scream. He couldn’t see what was happening, but he heard a scuffle, and several bodies fell.  Steve bent down and unstrapped him from the table.    
  
“Sh, it’s okay now, I got you.”  
  
“Stevie,” Bucky cried, his heart pounding.  “They — they were gonna…”  
  
“I won’t let them, not this time,” Steve said, and Bucky closed his eyes, letting Steve carry him.    
  
*  
  
Bucky lay in a cell where they had tossed him. His left arm seemed to be healing, but he was so hungry.  
  
Then, Steve was there, propping him up, holding a clean glass of water to his lips.    
  
“Not too fast, just sip, it’s okay.  I’m gonna get you outta here,” Steve said, and Bucky wondered why he was crying.    
  
*  
  
Bucky was in shock. They were dragging him.    
  
“My arm,” he cried, words slurring.  “Help, it hurts, my arm.”  
  
“Bucky,” Steve cried.  “I got you, it’s gonna be all right.  Here, I’ll carry you.”  
  
“Steve, thank god,” Bucky said.  “I thought I was a goner.”  
  
“I thought so too,” Steve cried.  “I thought so too.” 


	6. Nine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As a kid, Steve practiced copying Gustav Dore's illustrations to the Divine Comedy, while Bucky read over his shoulder. 
> 
> Now, Wanda leads Steve down into the Ninth Circle of Hell, where traitors are trapped in the ice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guys, sorry, this is irregular blank verse. I figured, if I was going to imitate Dante's Inferno, I might as well go all the way. Thanks for giving it a shot!!

Steve follows Wanda across a frozen land.  
Above them, the world is a weird inverted cone.   
Steve knows where he is, the eight rings winding up,   
screams worn thin in a howling, poisoned wind.   
Around them crime scenes litter the stony ground:   
bodies, weapons, explosions boiling the air,   
frozen snatches of time: _he remembers them all._   
  
Every murdered eye accuses Steve,   
excoriating mercy, demanding vengeance,   
revenge, avenging... Steve is supposed to care,  
but can’t.  Steve only cares about the man  
whose mind he now traverses, the guilt, the sins,   
the wounds, the trauma, all the things he carries,  
burdens Steve can’t shoulder.  All he can hope,   
right here, right now, is to undo the power of Nine,  
the ninth ring of hell reserved for the very worst,   
those who betray their nation, family, friends.    
  
Steve would rather die than call Bucky a traitor:  
the man who picked him up when he got knocked down,  
the man who made sure he could eat, and sleep, and breathe  
when no one else gave a damn if he lived or died,   
the man who fought for him, died a living death,   
all because he picked up the shield Steve dropped:     
Bucky’s no traitor— he's exactly the opposite.   
  
Down and down, to the frozen pit of hell,   
passing through scenes right out of Doré illustrations  
from when Bucky lugged the big book home for Steve  
so Steve could practice his hatchwork, tone, and line,  
but the frozen here are Hydra’s victims,   
caught at the moment the Soldier took them out.    
Steve imagines the number nine abstract  
firing in Bucky’s brain with the power of math,   
sniper instincts, calculations, trajectories,   
on the other side from words, in the paths  
where neurons fire in shapes and rhythms and patterns:   
  
Steve envisions Tarot, the nine of wands,   
the nine of swords, danger, heartbreak, loss;   
on the field, nine innings, then you’re done,   
nine months till a baby breathes first breath —   
simple symmetries far too innocent  
for the chains of guilt Hydra hung round Bucky’s soul.  

How can Steve’s forgiveness melt the ice  
encrusting every surface, every corpse   
embedded in the crystalline matrix of memory?  
Steve doesn’t know how he’ll do it, just that he’ll do  
whatever it takes to save Bucky — hell itself  
will not see Steve abandon his best friend.    
  
Down and down, past murders, crimes unknown:  
accidents, arsons, men gone missing, all  
targets of the ghost, the Winter Soldier.    
Steve can almost put a name to some,  
vague historical mysteries out of the books  
he used to make some sense out of this new world,   
blackened and stained by the ashes of the old.

When he sees the wreck, and Howard’s face  
bloody, the twisted neck, the murdered wife,   
Steve weeps hot tears.  Bucky would never.  He’d never.   
But he had: his hands had done the deed,   
the hands that held Steve down while the mission raged   
implacable behind his horrified eyes.    
  
 _Traitor, traitor!_ screams the tableau of shame.    
Steve’s troubled heart beats hard.  He knew, he’d figured,   
really known, but he couldn’t bear to say it   
as outright fact: _Bucky killed your parents._  
The facts were so much messier: Bucky wasn’t   
even there.  His body, sure; but the Bucky   
Steve adored drowned somewhere in an oily sea,   
wrapped in tentacles, mind shocked to oblivion.    
  
An icy wind blows past the car wreck, howling  
like the sirens of the Blitz, and Steve   
remembers the burned out pub where Howlies sang,   
and Peggy wore red, and Bucky was hollowed out,  
already tortured.  Steve blames himself, shoulda known  
everything Bucky survived but shouldn’t have;  
death would have been a kinder fate, but Steve  
is greedy, will wrestle death — by God he’ll fight  
to wrench Bucky back from Hydra, death, or the Pit.    
  
Low in the deepest, frozen, icy lake,   
corpses lie submerged, the darkest kills,   
and there in the midst of them the skull rears up,   
grinning, malevolent, huge, its tentacles   
twisting into the ice, and trapped between   
its cruel teeth is Bucky, limp and exhausted.    
His hair hangs tangled, sweaty and lank, across   
his hopeless eyes.  His nose and mouth are muzzled,   
legs swallowed up by the skull, and his arms are pinned.    
Hydra devours him, holds him there, face out  
to witness his supposed crimes and pay  
submission, guilt, the debt foul traitors owe.   
  
Steve declares _enough!_ His trusty shield   
(his mind supplies it, ready to his hand)  
flies true. Steve wedges apart the nasty teeth,   
begins to pry, and pull, and sob in grief  
as Bucky screams, his body bruised and torn.   
Hydra chewed him up but will not spit  
until Steve makes it yield up the dear prize.    
  
Bucky lies on the ice, defeated, free   
of the skull’s sadistic grip, but in his head   
he still belongs in hell’s worst level, Nine.  
Steve unfastens the muzzle, but pale eyes   
don’t seem to see, the pallid skin still cold,    
body weak and limp.  Steve looks to his guide,   
the Scarlet Witch, who trails behind, observing,   
saying little.   “Show him your mind,”  she says.  
“Is he a traitor? Does he deserve all this?”   
  
“No!” Steve declares.  “He’s the bravest man I know!  
Loyal, true, and fierce to protect his friends.   
He didn’t choose any of this.  He fought so hard,   
but they had the tank and the Chair.  They shut him down.    
Bucky was the Soldier’s secret flaw.    
They tried to wipe his mind completely blank,   
but Bucky always came back.  He tried to escape;   
fought against their agents, against their agenda.    
Natasha told me he trained her, gave her hope  
despite the tortures they put him through.  And at last,   
he’s free —  as long as I have breath to fight.”  
  
As Steve speaks, tears of fervent admiration,   
love, respect, and friendship track his cheeks,   
dripping onto the lifeless face of his friend —   
onto the sightless eyes, the pale pink mouth —   
and Bucky shudders, twitches and licks his lips.   
“Steve?” he says.  “Aw no, punk, you shouldn’t be here.”   
  
“Where do you think I should be,” Steve quips,   
eyes locked on the man who’s earned his prime allegiance.    
  
“Fields of glory, what are they called, Elysium,”   
Bucky mutters. “Valhalla, someplace for heroes.”   
  
“I know a guy,” Steve says, “but look around.”  
Bucky sits up, and looks around, agog.   
  
The ice is gone, the skull of Hydra banished.   
Sunny fields spread far and wide, abloom  
with poppies, red and orange, while shady trees  
reach lofty fingers up into a sky,  
so blue, so perfect, with a few soft clouds   
that only rain enough to make a bow.    
  
“Where is this?” Bucky asks. “Is it heaven, or Oz?”    
  
“It sure ain’t Kansas,” Steve laughs, and not far away,   
  
a dinner bell rings, calling the valiant home.    
  
  
  



	7. Furnace

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve take a while to really get to the bottom of this one.

The cell was dark, cold, damp, and it stank.  Bucky sat in the corner, on the floor.  From his left hand dangled a stained red book with a black star on the cover. His lips moved on their own as he silently recited the contents.   
  
“What are you,” Steve said, feeling a little helpless— “uh, what are you reading?”   
  
Bucky didn’t look around.  His gaze was trained low down on the back wall of the cell. Near the floor, hundreds of tally marks marked out the days he had been confined.  It seemed that even in cryo, Bucky had endured the creeping passage of time.   
  
“A reading,” Bucky said, in a low, toneless voice, “from the book of Hydra, chapter 3.”  
  
Fascinated, Steve listened closely, as Bucky began to recite the story of the furnace.  
   
“Zola built a factory, nine stories high and nine blocks around. He set it up in Azzano, near the border. All the Hydra agents from far and wide came to the opening ceremony, and stood around in the factory Zola had built, and the prisoners had to watch.   
  
“A Hydra goon proclaimed to the prisoners: “Heil Hydra! When you hear the big band strike up—all the trumpets and trombones, tubas and baritones, saxophones, cymbals and drums—get on your feet and work in the factory Zola has set up.   Anyone who does not stand and work shall be thrown immediately into a roaring furnace.”  
  
“The big band started to play, and the prisoners struggled to their feet and labored in the factory Zola had set up.  
  
“Just then, some Hydra goons stepped up and accused the Americans. They said to Zola, “Heil Hydra! You gave strict orders, sir, that when the big band started playing, everyone had to get up on their feet and work in the factory, and whoever did not go should be pitched into a roaring furnace. Well, there are some men here—Dugan, Morita, and Jones—they're  ignoring you, sir. They don’t respect your goals and they won’t work in the factory you set up.”  
  
“Furious, Zola ordered Dugan, Morita, and Jones to be brought in. When the men were brought in, Zola asked, “Is it true, Dugan, Morita, and Jones, that you don’t respect my goals and refuse to work in the factory that I have set up? I’m giving you a second chance—but from now on, when the big band strikes up you must get to your feet and work in the factory I have made. If you don’t work, you will be pitched into a roaring furnace, no questions asked. Who is the hero who can rescue you from Hydra?”  
  
“Dugan, Morita, and Jones answered Zola, “Your threats mean nothing to us. Even though you’ve got us in chains, the Allies can send a hero to rescue us from your roaring furnace and anything else you might cook up. But even if a hero doesn’t come, it won’t make a bit of difference. We still won’t serve your goals or work in the factory you set up.”  
  
“Zola, his face pale with anger, interrupted Dugan, Morita, and Jones. He ordered the furnace fired up seven times hotter than usual. He ordered some Hydra goons to tie them up, hands and feet, and throw them into the roaring furnace. Dugan, Morita, and Jones, bound hand and foot, fully dressed from head to toe, were pitched into the roaring fire. Because the scientist was in such a hurry and the furnace was so hot, flames from the furnace killed the men who carried them to it, while the fire raged around Dugan, Morita, and Jones.  
  
“Suddenly Zola jumped up in alarm and said, “Didn’t we throw three men, bound hand and foot, into the fire?”   
  
“That’s right, sir,” the Hydra goons said.  
  
“But look!” Zola said. “I see four men, walking around freely in the fire, completely unharmed! And the fourth man looks like one of the gods!”  
  
“Zola went to the door of the roaring furnace and called in, “Dugan, Morita, and Jones, you Americans, come out here!” Dugan, Morita, and Jones walked out of the fire.  
  
“All the Hydra leaders gathered around to examine the Americans and discovered that the fire hadn’t so much as touched the three men—not a hair singed, not a scorch mark on their uniforms, not even the smell of fire on them!  
  
“Zola said, “The hero who came to rescue Dugan, Morita, and Jones is very impressive! Erskine must have perfected his formula! None of my test subjects could pull off a rescue like this. I just need to grab my notes,” the scientist said, and ran away.    
  
“Then Dugan, Morita, and Jones destroyed Zola’s factory and marched away from Azzano, rescuing a thousand allies. After the war, Dugan, Morita, and Jones went home to lead normal lives.  They married their sweethearts and bought houses in the suburbs, drove big cars and doted on their grandkids.   
  
“The man in the furnace lived on, but the terrible heat of Hydra’s flame never died.  Cut off one head and two more will take its place. Zola’s plans prevailed. His algorithm wrote the book of the twentieth century. The furnace of Hydra forges the future.  Heil Hydra!”  
  
The red book still dangled from Bucky’s loose metal grip.  Tears ran down his face but his breathing was deep and slow.    
  
“I’m pretty sure that’s not how the story goes,” Steve said.    
  
Bucky didn’t answer.  He didn’t move, just stared at the wall, blinded by tears.    
  
“In fact I know that’s not the way it really happened, because I was there.”  
  
“You were there?” Bucky whispered.    
  
“Yes,” Steve said.   
  
“But — you went down.  The ice. The headlines.  They showed me.”   
  
“I’m so sorry, Buck,” Steve said.  “I never should have given up like that.  I thought you were — well, you were alive, and I’m so glad you’re still alive, and so sorry it took me so long to find you.”   
  
“Yeah,” Bucky said, his voice cracking a little.   
  
“Anyway,” Steve said, trying to get a grip on himself, “I know how it really went.  There was a big fire, that’s true, but all the Howlies were there, not just the three you mentioned.  Jacques, and Monty, and you and me — “   
  
“Stevie?” Bucky said, his eyes regaining some of their focus.   
  
“Yeah, I was there, Buck. Peggy got Howard to fly me in his own plane, over enemy territory, and I snuck into Zola’s factory and found you.  I don’t remember anything about a band.”   
  
Bucky hummed a fractured melody, but Steve had never been that good at recognizing a tune.    
  
“There was a fire though, you remember that?”   
  
Bucky broke off his humming to ask faintly, “The furnace?”   
  
“No, there wasn’t a furnace.  It was a factory, Zola and the Red Skull had you guys making those weapons.  I think it all had to do with the cosmic cube.  I don’t think anyone really knows for sure.  But the Red Skull set the whole place to blow up, and he and Zola escaped.”   
  
“They lived,” Bucky said.   
  
“The Red Skull is dead,” Steve said.  “I saw the cube destroy him with my own eyes. And Zola is dead too, though, he made himself into a computer somehow.”  
  
“Cut off two heads?” Bucky asked, still hopeless.   
  
“No,” Steve said. “They’re gone. You don’t need to worry about them any more.  We’ve burned Hydra to the ground; they’re all gone now.”   
  
“Furnace,” Bucky said.   
  
“No!” Steve said, losing his grip a little.  Bucky just stared at the wall without even flinching.   
  
Steve deliberately lowered his tone. “I found you after Zola gave you the serum.  You were pretty out of it.”   
  
Bucky lips moved, soundlessly shaping the word “furnace.”   
  
“You were repeating your name and serial number.  You were pretty surprised to see me.    
  
“Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes, 32557038,” Bucky said, and shook his head, and looked up at Steve.  “Stevie? Is that you? What are you doing here?”   
  
“I came to get you, Bucky,” Steve said, desperately grateful to meet Bucky’s sad pale gaze at last.    
  
“Punk, you’re supposed to be safe at home!”   
  
“I’m safe,” Steve said, just as spiky as he ever was.   
  
“Huh,” Bucky said, as Steve lifted him to his feet.  “What happened to you?  I thought you were smaller.”  
  
“I joined the army,” Steve said, getting Bucky’s right arm around his shoulders.  “Let’s get out of here.”   
  
“Can’t,” Bucky said.  “The fire is too hot.  Addles my brain.”   
  
“Nah,” Steve said.  “This here place has got nothin on Brooklyn in August.”   
  
“Ain't that the everliving truth,” Bucky agreed, and got his feet under him.    
  
Steve and Bucky got to the end of the hall before the walls fell away, and they found themselves on the narrow bridge high above the factory floor where self-destruct explosions were raging, bringing the place down.    
  
Steve once more fought hand to hand with the Red Skull while Bucky looked on, too weak to help, but it was easier than ever for Steve to punch Schmidt hard enough to make him go away. Just like always, Steve urged Bucky across the pit of fire to safety on the other side, just before the catwalk collapsed into the furnace the factory had become.     
  
“I’m not leaving,” Bucky said, “not without you!”   
  
“I never doubted that for a minute,” Steve swore, and soared across the inferno, leaping to Bucky’s side.    
  
“The furnace,” Bucky said.   
  
“It’s over,” Steve said.  “You don’t have to stay here one more second.”   
  
Bucky looked at the fire, which seemed to rise up in triumph, just for a moment — then he turned back to Steve.    
  
“Yeah,” he said.  “Let’s blow this joint.”   
  
Steve hoisted Bucky’s weight onto his own shoulder and half-carried him just a few steps.  Then the trees of Europe grew up around them — the forest of Italy.  Night breezes cooled the air around them. Somewhere, an honest-to-God nightingale was singing.   
  
“Darkling I listen; and, for many a time, I have been half in love with easeful Death, “ Bucky recited.    
  
“Nah, not that one, please,” Steve said.  “Hail to thee, blythe spirit!  Bird thou never wirt!”   
  
“That’s the skylark, Stevie, come on, get your birds straight.”   
  
“Straight birds go for me, they’re gonna be disappointed,” Steve muttered.   
  
“Well Steven Grant Rogers, I never,” Bucky teased, and laughed a little.    
  
“Come on, let’s get some rest,” Steve insisted.  They had all their kit, now, all the stuff they used to carry on the march.  Bucky and Steve each carried one half of a tent, and buttoned the two halves together, unrolled their bedrolls inside.    
  
Steve’s heart lifted as the bird sang loudly in the tree above them.  He remembered that night, fighting his instinct to latch onto Bucky, but knowing he owed it to the men to encourage them all.  This was a chance to change things —  nowadays it was called a “do-over.”   
  
“Bucky, you gotta know how glad I am to have you back again,” he said.   
  
“I don’t know, Steve,” Bucky said.  “The war’s changed me.  I ain’t the man I used to be.” Bucky was rustling through a modern backpack, the black one he’d had under the floor in his Bucharest flat.    
  
“I ain’t either,” Steve retorted, “as you can plainly see, but that ain’t important.  What’s important is, I love you, Bucky.  You mean everything to me.  Without you, I wasn’t even alive.  I was just going through the motions.”   
  
“I still ain’t sure I’m alive,” Bucky said.  
  
Steve grasped his arm and squeezed gently. “You are.  You’re alive, and it’s a goddamned miracle.  i would do anything, anything to keep you that way.”   
  
“Anything,” Bucky said.  “Sounds like too much.”   
  
“Not for me,” Steve declared.  “Not for you.”   
  
“You love me, huh?” Bucky said, after a minute.   
  
“I never said it,” Steve said softly.  “That don’t mean I never thought it.  I did.  Every day.  Even when I had nothing, Buck — you made sure I knew I had you.”   
  
“Yeah,” Bucky said. “I guess it was pretty clear, huh?” Bucky tucked his backpack under his head and lay back, staring up at the blank tent ceiling, so close to his face.    
  
“What?” Steve said.   
  
“Well, how I felt about you.  I know you were gonna marry Peggy, and I was happy for you, I was…”   
  
“How you felt — about me?” Steve said.   
  
“Yeah,” Bucky said.  “I loved you so much.  I couldn’t hardly stand it.  Every day, filling me up to the brim, it burned me, till nothing was left inside me, not hope nor nothing, just longing for you, licking like flame till everything tasted like ash —!”   
  
“Oh,” Steve said, realization sweeping through him.  He hadn’t even thought to wonder why he was still inside Bucky’s head, why the trigger hadn’t come undone.  “Bucky — you don’t understand.  I want you too.  That way.  I always have.  I thought you didn’t want me.”   
  
“What?” Bucky said, uncomprehending.  
  
“How could you want me — little, crotchety, sickly me — when you, you were perfect, gorgeous, smart, so talented, always primed to shoot to the top wherever you were.”   
  
“Stevie, no…”   
  
“Bucky, yes!” Steve laughed.  “There’s no need for any of this.  You love me, I love you — we love each other!”   
  
“But not like that,” Bucky denied.   
  
“Shut up and kiss me,” Steve said and rolled Bucky to meet him.    
  
Their lips crashed together, noses bumping.   
  
“Ow, Steve, fuck,” Bucky swore.    
  
“Kiss me, Bucky, you’re the one who knows how,” Steve whispered.   
  
Their lips found each other in the dark, and Bucky moved against Steve like a dream.  The heat of his breath, the taste of Bucky on his tongue, the tender hands that held Steve in place and pulled him close, the way their stubble scratched against one another, the fall of Bucky’s hair against Steve’s jaw… it was sublime. Their love sang cool and sweet, running clear like a mountain stream, like the nightingale’s song.  The furnace died down, and love bubbled up, new and clean and unfailing inside them both.    
  
Steve shook his head and opened his eyes, dazed and hungry for more.   
  
“That went well,” Wanda said, her eyes large and dark as she looked away.    
  
“Thanks,” Steve said.  “Let me know when you’re ready for the next one.”   
  
“Soon I hope,” Wanda said with a little grin. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quoted source material includes Keats's Ode to a Nightingale, Shelley's To a Skylark, and large chunks of CA:TFA from memory. And of course, an evil Hydra paraphrase of the Book of Daniel, chapter 3. No offense is intended.


	8. Daybreak

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This trigger may not be any worse than the others, but to Steve it feels more personal.

DAYBREAK  
  
  
Light breaks clear over Brooklyn, shines in through the faded curtains. Two young boys lie sprawled together on pulled out couch cushions, puppies in a pile.  The little blond boy is delicate and thin, with golden hair glowing in the clear light of dawn.  The darker haired boy is bigger, not much older, but heftier already, hale where the other seems fragile.  The older boy is smiling in his sleep, the little one tucked inside his arms, like a beloved stuffed animal or well-worn blanket.  
  
The peaceful scene is shattered by a masculine roar.  
  
“What the hell is this?”  
  
The boys jerk awake.   The dark haired boy sits up, scared, while the little one rubs his eyes and tries to get his bearings.    
  
“Ma said,” the older boy begins as the man stomps into the room from the kitchen.  
  
“Ma said, Ma said, I don’t care what she said.  I’m the man of the house!  I won’t stand for it!”  
  
“Stand for what, sir?”  the little one says, looking up.    
  
“Stevie, shut up!” the darker one hisses.    
  
“I better go,” the little one says, grabbing his shoes from under the couch and hurriedly jamming them on. Way too big, they’re lined with newspaper to make them fit.    
  
“Damn right you better go!  and don’t come back, you little fairy!”  
  
“Pa, no!  Stevie ain’t no fairy!”  Bucky tries to stand up to his father, but there’s no chance. He goes down with one swing of George Barnes’s mighty arm.    
  
“Bucky!” Steve shouts, starting to dash forward, but he’s seized around the middle by Bucky’s ma, Winifred.    
  
“You get outta here, Steven, do as you’re told,” Bucky’s ma says, low and furious.    
  
Steve is red and just as mad.  Bucky’s on the floor, swaying on his knees, unable yet to get back up.    Steve hesitates but Winifred pushes him out the door.  “Go!”  
  
“That never happened,” Steve says to Wanda.  “Bucky’s parents weren’t like that.  I know Bucky’s dad could be pretty hard on him, but not like that.”  
  
Wanda lifts one shoulder in an eloquent Sokovian shrug.  “In Bucky’s mind, it is a reflection of his reality,” she says.  
  
“But how can we change it,” Steve says. “It’s not what happened, it’s what he was afraid of happening.”  
  
Wanda sighs.  “I have shown their deepest dread to many people. In Bucky’s mind are layers and layers of this fear.  It might take days to figure it out.”  
  
“Days,” Sam laughs, later in the palace refectory closest to the medical wing where Bucky is kept.  “She complains about days, when it takes months or sometimes years of therapy the good old-fashioned way.”  
  
Steve snorts and says nothing.  In his day, only the rich could hope for the new-fangled Freudian analysis, or a more traditional rest cure in the country.  Poor like himself were locked into the loony bin to face whatever torments the quacks were experimenting with at the time.    
  
“The last one went kind of easy, if you ask me,” Steve says.  “I thought there would be some kind of progression.”  
  
“There is,” Wanda says, “but it’s associative, not linear.”  
  
“Yeah, that’s what I was about to say,” Sam rolls his eyes at Steve, making Wanda smile a little.    
  
“What’s the progress then, how’s it going in there,” Sam asks Wanda.  
  
“In my opinion, it is going very well,” she replies.  “They actually admitted to each other that they are in love.”  
  
“The hell you say,” Sam says, turning to Steve with questioning eyes.  
  
Steve expects ribbing, but Sam is serious.  “I hope you’re not offended,” Steve says, taken aback by Sam’s reaction.  
  
“Well, I am now, that you just said that,” Sam retorts, “but no, what I’m actually concerned about is Bucky’s level of consent.”  
  
“His what now?” Steve asks.  “He told us to keep him in cryo until we could figure out how to undo the triggers - which is what we’re doing.”  
  
“He told you to let the Wakandan scientists work on undoing the triggers,” Sam says.  “He didn’t say you, personally, could go rifling through his hopes and fears — especially when those fears concern this actual thing, whatever it is, the thing he has with you.”  
  
Steve stares stubbornly at Sam, a look Sam has had plenty of time to learn to recognize.  “If he had a problem, he would let me know.”  
  
“No, man,” Sam says, a little more gently.  “You’re rummaging around in his subconscious, underneath his defense mechanisms.  He has no way of stopping you, and no idea that he might need to say no.  You gotta wake him up.”  
  
“Oh,” Steve says.  “Well.  I got no problem with that.”  
  
“You are the actual worst,” Sam accuses.  “You just wanna hit that while he’s awake.”  
  
Steve makes a little mouth of due consideration.  
  
“It is no trouble to revive him,” T’Challa tells them when they ask.  “But he will need to remain in the most secure parts of the palace, for his own safety as well as that of my people.”  
  
“I gotta ask,” Sam says.  “What’s the state of the triggers? Is there any chance someone could activate him if we let him out of cryo?”  
  
“No,” Steve says, crossing his arms. “I don’t think so.”  
  
“Okay, Mister Certainty, but I’m asking Wanda,” Sam says.  
  
Wanda always has that vaguely glassy look in her eyes that doesn’t exactly inspire the most confidence in her scientific analysis, but the Wakandans seem to trust her assessments.  “We’ve managed to destabilize six out of the ten trigger complexes in Bucky’s mind.”  
  
“Destabilize?” T’Challa says.  “To what extent does that make him safer — could it possibly make him more volatile?”  
  
“Barnes's captors studied him to find which words most disturbed his mind with pain and trauma,” Wanda explains.  “Then they reinforced those trigger words, deliberately traumatizing the sergeant again and again, and using their shock device at a level that wiped out most of his memories except for the most deeply scarred areas of trauma."

“Basically the only things he could remember at all were the worst things that had ever happened to him,” Sam says, shaking his head.  
  
“Or things he feared,” Steve adds, frowning.    
  
“Yes,” T’Challa concurs.  “My scientific team corroborates this analysis, but they were not certain how best to reverse such extreme and deliberate trauma.” 

"When the mind is faced with so much trauma, dissociation often results."

"He shuts down," Sam nods.

"Yes," Wanda agrees, "but through a long process of manipulation they established control over the persona that remained -- the Winter Soldier. Steve and I are encouraging his brain to heal around the specific areas of trauma-- the triggers -- so that it's less and less likely that he would fall back into that persona."

"Excellent," T'Challa says.   
  
“In this case, Hydra planted the seeds of their own destruction,” Wanda smiles grimly.  “They wanted to use my brother and me as weapons.  They taught me to reach into the mind and find the deepest fear, to let it play out in order to incapacitate any opponents.  But now, I can easily see into the sergeant’s mind and help him play out his fears in ways that help him to heal.”  
  
T’Challa nods at Wanda with satisfaction. “This makes me ever more satisfied that I extended the hospitality of our country to you during your friend’s convalescence. I feel that this will not only help in his recovery, but might be of help to many people who are suffering from the aftermath of trauma.”  
  
“We are learning a lot,” Wanda says simply.  
  
“We’re just so grateful for your help,” Steve says, for what has to be the hundred millionth time, and will never be enough.    
  
“So you’re gonna wake him up?” Sam asks.  “Why won’t it work this time to just do the thing, Wanda’s magic red brain thing.”  
  
Steve looks at Wanda questioningly.  
  
“We’ve approached the other triggers by inserting Steve into the midst of the triggering event, changing the outcome from what Sergeant Barnes remembers,” Wanda explains slowly.  “This particular complex of fears is closely tied to Steve himself, and his presence in the scene is actually the most painful part of the trigger for Barnes.  For Steve to enter the scene won’t change it, but might even make it worse.”  
  
“I don’t really understand,” Steve says.  “What’s Bucky afraid of about Daybreak? I mean, the only one I’ve seen so far, he seems to be afraid of his parents.”  
  
“No, Captain,” Wanda says gently.  “Sergeant Barnes is afraid of his feelings for you, and what might happen when they are exposed to the light of day.”  
  
“Yeah,” Sam says.  “That sounds right.  The thirties and forties were not the happiest time for men who loved other men — especially if they fell into the hands of Nazis.”  
  
Wanda nods. “In some of the scenarios, he is protecting you.  In some, you turn on him.  In some, he loses you.  In some he fails you.  In every scenario, daybreak only destroys his dream of peace.”  
  
“Wow,” Steve says.    
  
“Huh,” Sam says.  
  
“We’ll wake him up,” T’Challa says.  “I see why his explicit consent is vital before proceeding any further.”  
  
Steve frowns, but nods his agreement.    
  
The wakeup procedure is nothing like what the file indicated Hydra did when they brought him out of cryo.  The Wakandans simply remove the supercooled gas from Bucky’s chamber and wait for him to thaw out and wake up.  They also administer a high dosage of opiate so that he doesn’t wake up while still suffering the thaw.  When he wakes, he is snug in a warm bed, and Steve is sitting in a chair by the window.  He’s fast asleep, a book about a girl with a tattoo falling out of his lax hands.  
  
He takes a ragged breath but can’t speak without coughing. Steve instantly wakes up, grabs a cup of room-temperature water and holds the straw to his lips.  
  
“The triggers,” he whispers.    
  
“Nice to see you too,” Steve jokes, but he realizes that for Bucky no time has passed. “We’ve made a lot of progress, but we needed to wake you up for this one.”  
  
“Progress?” Bucky asks, still a little hoarse.  
  
“We’ve unravelled six of the ten triggers,” Steve tells Bucky.  “Do you remember any of what we did?”  
  
“No,” Bucky says.  “What do you mean, what you did? I thought the Wakandans were going to work on this.”  
  
“They are,” Steve says, “but Wanda has been able to access your sleeping mind to help work through the triggers — the scientists are very impressed.”  
  
“Good,” Bucky says slowly.  “So.  Why’d you wake me up before you were finished?”  
  
“Uh,” Steve says, blushing.  “Sam wanted to make sure that you, uh, that it was okay for me, to be inside you… “  
  
“What?” Bucky says, when Steve can’t go on.  
  
“Bucky, the thing is,” Steve starts again.  
  
“Come on, Steve, spit it out,” Bucky grumbles, and he sounds so much like the old days that Steve relaxes for an instant.  
  
“We’re, uh, we have, we both feel the same way,” Steve finally says.  
  
“Feel the same way?” Bucky says blankly.  
  
“About each other.”  
  
“Best pal a guy could have,” Bucky says.  “As far as I can remember.”  
  
“You uh, you don’t remember what happened in  your head — with the last trigger?” Steve asks, red as a sunburn.     
  
“What did I do,” Bucky says, dread in his voice.    
  
“No!  Nothing!  You didn’t — not like that,” Steve rapidly reassures him.  
  
“So, what, then?” Bucky says, beginning to get a little exasperated.    
  
Steve frowns deeply.  “Okay, well — the next trigger.  I don’t want to say it out loud.  But.  The sun comes up and you and I are sleeping on the floor, on the couch cushions.”  
  
“Yeah,” Bucky says.  “Yeah, I do remember that.”  
  
“Then your dad comes in and yells at us, and calls me a fairy, and your ma tells me to get out.”  
  
Bucky looks at Steve sharply.  “I don’t— did that—?  —that’s not much like what I remember.”  
  
“No,” Steve says, “no, it isn’t.  But what they’re telling me is, it’s not what you remember happening, but what you fear might have happened.  Like in your head, it basically did happen — that’s how afraid you are of it.”  
  
“My dad calling you a fairy?” Bucky scoffs.  “You ain’t no fairy.”  
  
“But what if I am,” Steve says.  His voice even, his eyes steady, he straightens up tall and squares back his shoulders.  Bucky has seen that look on Steve’s face a hundred times, and every time, he was about to get clobbered.  
  
“Ah, Stevie, what are you tryna get at?” Bucky laughs.  “You loved the ladies, same as me.”  
  
“No,” Steve says, “no, I didn’t.  I didn’t mind em; and Peggy sure was a hell of a woman; but you were the only one I ever loved.”  
  
A flash of fear went across Bucky’s face. “Ha, ha, Steve, that’s a good one.”  
  
“Bucky, it’s okay now.  I mean, sure, some people are still hateful, but in America it’s legal now.  Folks can get married and everything.”  
  
“Folks always did get married, Steve, even I remember that,” Bucky said, unhelpfully.  
  
“No, I mean, two men, or two women, if they’re in love.  They can get married.”  
  
“You mean like those two queens who lived down the street from our place?”  
  
“I mean, legally married in the eyes of God and man,” Steve says.  
  
“Oh,” Bucky says.    
  
Steve waits a minute but Bucky doesn’t say any more.    
  
“Sam says I have to make sure it’s okay for me to look inside your head, help you deal with your triggers.”  Steve wasn’t sure what to say, but at least he was nothing if not persistent.  
  
“Yeah, sure,” Bucky says absently.  
  
“You sure?” Steve asks.    
  
“I said sure, didn’t I?  Did I stutter?” Bucky answers sharply.  
  
“Okay,” Steve says, backing off.  “Okay, Buck. Well, we thought you might want a little vacation from cryo, a few days out of the tank.”  
  
“No,” Bucky says.  “No, I do not.  Put me back and finish off these god damned triggers, okay?”  
  
“Okay,” Steve says, subdued.    
  
“Okay,” Bucky says, and he doesn’t say any more, just stands looking out the windows at the Wakandan greenery until the scientists come to check him over.  
  
Miraculously, he’s in better shape physically than when he went in.  He had taken a few days to heal up from everything he’d gone through in the fights after they’d found him in Bucharest, but now those wounds are completely healed, and he’s beginning to lose the ragged look he’d had while in hiding.  
  
“You want anything?” Steve asks hopefully.  
  
“Nah,” Bucky says.  “Better to go into cryo on an empty stomach.’’  
  
“Okay,” Steve says and mournfully watches as Bucky goes back into his deep frozen sleep.  
  
“That did not go the way you were hoping,” Sam notices.  
  
“He said it was okay, the way we’re doing it, so,” Steve says, trying not to bristle.  
  
“Okay,” Sam says, easily. “That’s good, that’s good.”  
  
Steve wants to jump straight in but Wanda’s not ready yet. The scene with the couch cushions is deep but there are a lot of other parts to the trigger, spread out all over Bucky’s memories.  It’s reminding Steve of the trigger around “Benign,” but there, Steve’s interference allowed Bucky’s mind to finally reimagine and dismiss the trauma.  Here, with Daybreak, it’s Steve very presence, every time, that forms the nexus of the trigger itself.    
  
“You can’t very well punch out Bucky’s mom and dad,” Sam points out.  
  
“No, I can’t,” Steve frowns.  
  
“Well, I mean, the couch cushion thing.  That’s something that really happened?” Sam asks.  
  
“Yeah, but no accusations, no fight, none of that,” Steve says.    
  
“Okay, well — why don’t you go back in and remember it the way it was — but let Bucky know you know what he’s afraid of.”    
  
“Hey,” Steve joshes.  “You’re pretty good at this.  It’s like you’re a professional counselor or something.”  
  
“You should have been in therapy at least once a week the whole time since you’ve been unfrozen,” Sam says, waggling his finger.  “Nick Fury may be one of the most amazing brothers on the planet, but he’s lacking in that much common sense, if he didn’t make sure you were getting some help.”  
  
“He kind of exiled me to a cabin for like a month until I said I had my shit together,” Steve admits.    
  
“Oh hell no,” Sam says.  “And the cabin’s still standing?”  
  
“Maybe a few holes in the walls here and there,” Steve admits.    
  
“Lord have mercy,” Sam says.  “So, will you please, please ask someone here in Wakanda to set you up with a good therapist? I don’t count; personal friends do not good therapists make.”  
  
“Okay,” Steve sighs.  
  
“No excuses!” Sam insists, knowing Steve all too well.  
  
“Okay!” Steve says.  
  
Steve manages two therapy sessions with a Wakandan therapist that T’Challa recommends. The Wakandans have an integrated mind-body-spirit philosophy of holistic health treatment, which suits Steve surprisingly well.  Wakandan therapy takes place in a kind of trance-like state, with drumming, and walking, swaying slowly around and around in a circle, and for Steve it really works.  After only two sessions, Steve feels much clearer about the present, the past, and productive plans for the future.    
  
Wanda tells Steve at breakfast about a week after Bucky goes back in that she thinks they are ready to make an attempt.  

Steve tries to remind himself that going inside Bucky’s head is no different this time than it has been all the times before, but despite all that, this time feels different somehow.    
  
With the initial trigger, Wanda had held out her hand, and instinctively, he had trusted her.  He had jumped into Bucky’s head like jumping out of a plane.  It was what he did.  Reckless, yeah, but it got the job done.  
  
This time, Wanda had worried over the trigger for a week, trying to figure a way in. These triggers were insidious, and every one was nasty. With words like Rusted or Furnace, Steve understood how these words would carry bad associations inside Bucky’s head.  But with seemingly pleasant words like Benign, or completely neutral words like One and Nine, Steve felt a little blindsided.  Now, with Daybreak, Steve thought it was awful that such a beautiful concept should be twisted and corrupted by trauma — and apparently, the word had hinted at such a meaning for Bucky practically his whole life — only to have its disruptive associations reinforced by Hydra’s torture.    
  
Steve has never been one to back down from a fight.  He hopes that for once, the combative nature at his very core would serve Bucky well instead of making life harder.    
  
Wanda stands near Bucky’s cryo tank, the scarlet wisps of sorcery, or whatever it was, drifting around her fingers like smoke in a Mucha poster.   Steve takes his young teammate’s hand, and slips down into Bucky’s dreams, reaching deep inside himself to find a calm compassion as he makes ready to confront another of Bucky’s deepest fears.     
  
This time, Steve is no longer a disembodied observer, or a hero ready to swoop in and save the day.  This time, he finds himself back inside his tiny six year old body.  He remembers it.  It wasn’t that long ago, really.  He remembers always being little.  He remembers cuddling on his mother’s lap, her sweet angel as she combed his fine hair with her fingers, always smelling faintly of hospital soap.    
  
Now, he lies on the brink of wakefulness, hot and content in Bucky’s arms.  His heart pounds to think of it, how deeply they bonded to each other at such a young age, with so little in common. A series of miracles had brought Steve to this moment — the day his parents decided to try out their new married lives in the new world — the day Bucky’s dad decided to leave the family farm in Indiana and find his fortune in the big city — the day Steve had gotten decked by a scoundrel who’d stolen a little girl’s ice cream nickel — and that little girl had been Becky, Bucky’s Irish twin, and Bucky had helped Steve up, looked him in the eye, told him he was aces, and he didn’t even care that Steve failed to get Becky’s nickel back.  
  
This is Steve’s favorite place in the whole wide world — even better than his own mother’s soap scented lap, because she’s always kissing him goodbye.  Bucky runs hot, and he cuddles like Steve thinks a teddy bear should, with long arms that wrap around him and a warm front that chases away the cold from Steve’s thin, bony back.    
  
Then he remembers why he’s here, and he just has time for a second’s worth of panic when he hears George Barnes roar out, “What in the hell is this?”  
  
He sits up fast this time.  “What’s what?” he says and looks Bucky’s dad straight in the eye.  
  
George Barnes wasn’t a bad father, as dads in the twenties went.  He didn’t get drunk except on Fridays;  he didn’t waste away the money the family needed for food and shelter; he didn’t tomcat around with loose women; he didn’t beat Winifred and only spanked the kids with his hand, never his belt.  But he towers now, a fearsome figure, over the two little boys waking up on the couch cushions on a Saturday morning.  Bucky is afraid of how they look, two boys who clearly love each other, a clean, wholesome devotion that only the most blessed of brothers ever feel.  His fearful brain is already twisting that love into something sordid and wrong.    
  
Steve scrambles to his feet and blurts out the first thing he can think of.  “Mister Barnes, weren’t you an Eagle Scout?”  
  
“Huh?” Barnes says, freezing in his tracks.  He’s a phantom, just a figment of Bucky’s imagination, and Steve has gone off script.    
  
“I bet you must have camped out a thousand times in Indiana, huh? Did you build your own camp? Did you have to use a hatchet to make your own tent poles?”  
  
“Well, sure,” George says.  “A boy always needs to know how to use a hatchet.”  
  
“Gosh,” Steve says, “I ain’t got a hatchet, but then, if I chopped down a tree here in Brooklyn I’d probably be in pretty hot water.”  
  
“He knows all the knots,” Bucky said, sleepily.  “I don’t know half of them yet.”  
  
“Show me a knot, would ya please, sir?” Steve entreats.  
  
“You boys are up early,” Winifred Barnes says.  She’s a beauty still, tall and strong, with her lovely curling chestnut hair and big, clear blue eyes.    
  
“Make us a pot of coffee, dear,” George says.  “These boys want to learn a few knots before breakfast.”  
  
“Yes sir!” Steve chimes in and smiles to help soothe over the troubled look in Bucky’s eyes.  Bucky darts a few more careful glances at his dad, but Steve has somehow averted the storm.    
  
They sit down with a few old shoestrings and start to learn knots.  The memory slowly returns to Steve, that long ago Saturday morning, learning knots from Bucky’s dad, thick slices of toast with butter and jam and milky coffee and Bucky concentrating on the ins and outs of the string, the wireless playing ragtime softly in the background, the gentle memory soothing over the fears of something that easily could have happened, but never actually did.  
  
“That’s one down,” Wanda whispers, pulling Steve out.  
  
“You seriously trumped Barnes’s internalized homophobia by calling up how his daddy was an Eagle Scout?” Sam says, over the dinner he’s ruthlessly dragged Steve and Wanda out to, a night on the town in the Wakandan capital.  
  
“Your pal wanna stay frozen, here in the crown jewel of human civilization, don’t mean we got to deprive ourselves,” Sam points out, denying Steve’s desire to stay in.  
  
The food is amazing, bitter greens and a delicious starchy wad of something underneath something very like curried chicken.  The drink is bubbly and tart and refreshing.  Steve decides he loves Wakandan food and wants nothing more than to eat it with Bucky.    
  
Wanda is reserved, eating her meal with her eyes cast down.  Steve realizes she still blames herself for the deaths of the Wakandan delegation. Steve regrets it, of course, but the violence and the deaths were on Rumlow’s head, not the Avengers’.  If they hadn’t stopped him, Lord knows who might have ended up in control of a vial of deadly viruses.    
  
“What’s the plan with Bucky?” Sam asks Wanda, drawing her out.  
  
“I’ve been able to narrow the complexes down to a few key fears,” Wanda says.  “Steve has already defused one of the oldest and strongest, the fear of his father banning Steve from the house.”  
  
Steve frowns at his food.  “I bet I can guess the next one,” he says.  
  
“Yeah?” Sam encourages.    
  
“Bucky started trying to set me up with girls when he was thirteen or so.  He started chasing girls really young.  Of course I had no interest — girls either ignored me or despised me, and I was just too highstrung to talk to them — but he wouldn’t take no for an answer.  Now I guess I see why he was so insistent.”  
  
“The keyword is Daybreak, right?” Sam points out.  “What does that have to do with girls?”  
  
“I’m sorry, Sam,” Steve says reluctantly.  “I think it’s Bucky’s story to tell.”  
  
“No worries, man, I get that,” Sam says.  “He can tell me himself once you get these things all out of his head.”  
  
===  
  
 It’s a hot summer night in Brooklyn, and Bucky is dancing exceptionally well with one girl who’s grinning and laughing all over him.  
  
“Listen,” Bucky shouts in Steve’s good ear while the girl goes to powder her nose.    
  
“Ow,” Steve says, pulling away.  
  
“Your ma is out working all night tonight, ain’t she?”  
  
“Yeah,” Steve says.  Seems like she’s always working these days, struggling to put a little something by for the future.    
  
“Let me take Starla back to your place,” Bucky says.  
  
“What?” Steve says, shocked.  
  
“Come on,” Bucky says. “She’s a modern girl, she’s willing.  You gotta help me out here, pal.”  
  
“What are you gonna do?” Steve asks, scandalized.    
  
“What do you think?” Bucky says.  “Whatever I can get away with, of course.”  
  
“Bucky!” Steve scolds.  “That’s not right.  You can’t take advantage of a lady.”  
  
“Maybe she’s the one taking advantage,” Bucky says.  “Huh? you ever think?”  
  
Steve scowls, a dark cloud blocking out the twinkling lights of the dance hall.    
  
“She’s seventeen,” Bucky emphasizes.  “Think about it.”  
  
Steve doesn’t want to think about it.  He turns fourteen on the fourth of July, and Bucky’s been fifteen since March.  He does enough at the garage to have a little spending money, which means he drags Steve all over the five boroughs, wherever the music is hot.  Steve likes the music okay, but he doesn’t have wind enough to Lindy, and anyway he’d rather watch Bucky, who’s naturally a very gifted dancer, and his dark good looks make all the ladies go a little ga-ga.  Steve might as well be invisible, which pretty much suits him fine.    
  
Now though he doesn’t want to think about Bucky and Starla and whatever they’re thinking about.  Still, he knows he owes it to Bucky, who’s been his best pal through thick and thin practically his whole life.    
  
He nods, and Bucky is ecstatic.    
  
“You’re absolute aces, Steve, I owe you one,” Bucky swears.    
  
Steve spends the night on the fire escape, waiting for dawn, but it seems like the longest night of the year instead of the shortest.  At least it’s warm, he has his own pillow, and a little pallet made up of folded blankets.  He lies there, trying not to listen to Bucky making time with the girl, and he tries to pretend it’s the girl’s sighs and whimpers making his Johnson stand to attention.    
  
At last Bucky leaves to walk the girl home, and Steve climbs in through the window.  He’s afraid to look at his own bed; he can’t stand the thought of rumpled sheets.  But his bed is still nicely made, just as he’d left it that morning; they must have kept their activities confined to the sofa.    
  
Steve shucks off his clothes, washes with a cloth and cold water, and gets under the sheet, immediately dropping off to sleep.  
  
He awakens at first light, opening his eyes to see Bucky staring at him, the strangest look on his face.    
  
“Morning, Buck,” Steve whispers.  The magic spell of dawn surrounds them.  The city hasn’t awoken yet, this early on a Sunday.    
  
Bucky doesn’t speak, he just stares at Steve.  Steve doesn’t mind — he smiles back at his friend.  Bucky just stares, blank and maybe a little hollow.  It’s not how Steve thought he’d look after a night with that dame.    
  
When the tears well up in Bucky’s eyes, Steve remembers — this is a dream.  They’re inside Bucky’s head.  He’s meant to take the pain away.  
  
“Did you have a good time?” Steve asks Bucky softly.  
  
“No,” Bucky says.  
  
“Oh,” Steve says, “well….”  
  
“I fucked her,” Bucky says.  “She had a rubber.”  
  
“Oh!” Steve says.  “Um.  Congratulations?”  
  
“Why does it hurt so much?” Bucky whispers, the tears finally rolling.  
  
“Why does it hurt…?” Steve repeats, stupid. “It’s supposed to feel good.”  
  
“It felt good, I mean, it was sex, it felt pretty damn great at the time,” Bucky says.    
  
“Good,” Steve says.  
  
“But now…  I’m so sad.  It wasn’t … she wasn’t what I want…”  
  
Steve remembers what he’d said to Bucky, something about next time looking for a redhead.  Starla had been a little blonde thing, just Bucky’s type. Making a joke now won’t help Bucky, just the opposite.    
  
“Bucky, I think I might know what you want,” Steve says gently.    
  
“No, you don’t,” Bucky says.  Like an astral experience, Steve sees another room, identical to the one they’re in, two teenage boys identical to Steve and Bucky at fourteen and fifteen, except Steve is slugging Bucky in the jaw, punching him bloody and shoving him at the door, telling him he’s a fucking queer, hideous disgust distorting Steve’s doppelgänger face.  It makes Steve sick, but he doesn’t have time for that now.  
  
“Listen, let me tell you what I dreamed,” Steve says.    
  
“Huh?” Bucky says, diverted slightly from his misery.    
  
“I finally fell asleep, and I dreamed a wonderful dream.  It was a hundred years from now, and I was walking through the park.”  
  
“Where was I?” Bucky asks.  
  
“Right there with me, jerk, where else would you be?”  
  
“Uh-huh,” Bucky says.    
  
“So in this dream, I start to notice how happy most everybody looks. They have nice clothes, they look well-fed, they’re not all starved and scraggly.  Some folks are pushing big fancy baby buggies.  Everyone is smiling and laughing with each other.”  
  
“Us too?” Bucky asks.  
  
“You bet,” Steve assures him.  “Then I notice something odd.  Some of the baby buggies,  it’s two men pushing.”  
  
“What, like brothers?” Bucky says.  
  
“No, I don’t think so.  And then I see these two guys, right out in the open, holding hands and walking down the street, and no one even bats an eye at them.”  
  
“Ha ha,” Bucky says.  “That’s how you know you were dreaming.”  
  
“No, Bucky,” Steve says.  “It’s all real.  If we wanted to, the two of us could put down a blanket in Prospect Park, feed each other cake and ice cold plums, and hug and kiss all we wanted, as long as we kept it clean for the kids.”  
  
“Why on earth would we wanna do any of that?” Bucky asks, but his voice is small, and his eyes are dark.    
  
“Because that’s how it is when you’re in love, you want the whole world to know,” Steve says.    
  
“In love?” Bucky says.  
  
“Yeah,” Steve says calmly.  
  
“Who’s in love?” Bucky asks.    
  
“I’m in love with you,” Steve says plainly.  “As far as who you’re in love with, you tell me,” he says.  
  
“You,” Bucky says, very small.  
  
“What?” Steve says, smiling off to the side.  “That was my bad ear, Buck, say it again.”  
  
“You, jackass,” Bucky roars, “I’m in love with you!”  
  
“I thought so,” Steve smiles, nodding smugly.    
  
While Bucky sits staring at Steve, speechless, Steve checks his wrist watch.  
  
“How many more of these nightmares brought to life in the cold light of day have you got, Buck? I wanna get this done.”  
  
For a moment Steve finds himself in the woods, somewhere in Europe, facing down his own furious Commandos.  
  
“Are you kidding me, Bucky?” Steve says.  “This must be the one where the Howlies find us all wrapped around each other one morning and threaten us with a blue ticket.  You probably never knew that Jim had himself ordained to perform the marriage of his granddaughter to another woman when he was 91.”  
  
“Jim was ordained?” Bucky asks.  
  
“Just for marriages,” Steve concedes.    
  
“Holy cow,” Bucky says. The tableau of angry Howlies fades, hardly having had time to solidify.  
  
Peggy Carter materializes behind Bucky, white with fury, holding a gun.  
  
“Whoa there, calm down a minute,” Steve says, but luckily, in dreams he still has his shield, and he puts himself between Bucky and Peggy’s vengeful ghost.  Peggy succeeds in firing off a few rounds before Steve has time to explain.  
  
“She knew!” he shouts at Bucky.    
  
“Knew what?” Bucky returns.  
  
“She knew, somehow, about us!” Steve says.  The gunfire abruptly stops.  
  
“There wasn’t anything to know,” Bucky says.    
  
“That’s what we wanted to think,” Steve says.  “But apparently, we were pretty obvious.  Peggy was still alive when I was found.  She told me she always knew I loved you.  She wanted everything to work out for us, she was trying to work it all out when you were lost and I crashed in the Arctic.”  
  
“Steve, you damn punk, you deliberately crashed that plane,” Bucky complains.  
  
“I had to save New York!” Steve says.    
  
“The Dodgers moved anyway,” Bucky grouses.    
  
The two pals take a moment to curse the Dodgers silently.  
  
“What did Peggy mean, she wanted everything to work out,” Bucky says.  
  
“Well,” Steve starts, blushing.    
  
“What?” Bucky says.  “What?”  
  
“Peggy wanted me,” Steve says, red as fire, “but she wouldn’t have minded having you too, so she said.”  
  
“Both of us?” Bucky says, stunned.    
  
The men think about it for a moment.  
  
“What a woman,” Bucky says.  
  
“Yup,” Steve acknowledges. “So, any more nightmare scenarios?”  
  
“No?”  
  
“Good, because I packed a picnic and I wanted to watch the sunrise with you.”  
  
Imaginary picnics are even better than real ones — the blanket is soft, the basket is light, the champagne doesn’t bring on headaches, and the sun comes up in a pink and gold extravaganza over two lovers with eyes only for each other.    
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The part about Nick Fury putting Steve in a cabin to work it out? I read that in someone's story, but I think it is also based on Canon, maybe something that showed up in Agents of Shield. If you recognize the detail, please let me know where it is from. --- thanks digitalwave for confirmation that this was canon from Agents of Shield. what the hell Nick???
> 
> Only three more words to go (Seventeen, Rusted, Longing)! Please let me know what you think!


	9. Seventeen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky remembers the year Steve turned Seventeen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is in the second person -- it is Bucky's pov :)

You’ve heard it said: youth is wasted on the young.  
  
You weren’t quite sure what it meant, in those days, you were too young yourself to really understand, but now it’s all too clear.    
  
You were more than a year older.  It’s not all the much: a few dozen weeks, a book and a half of days.  Somehow it made such a difference back then.  
  
You saw him grow beautiful, more and more beautiful, until it hurt your eyes to look at him.  It wasn’t merely the allure of youth; not when sickness and sorrow had hollowed him out time after time after time.  No, he was always a gold made pure by refining.  His slight smile formed around hard-won wisdom, his bitterness tempered by resolve, laughter a little harsh, but ready to give in.  His fine blond hair was a sunlight that could not be clouded.  
  
He’d stand in the corner of the room and god damn it all, you couldn’t even look at him.  His beauty like to knock you down, made you so dizzy you’d spin right round.  None of the dames with their dimestore blush could hold a candle to his fevered cheek, his rough chapped lips.    
  
You pined, even when he was in your grasp.  You pined and you smiled.  You held yourself back on the tightest leash, somehow kept from fawning like a dog.  You wanted him so bad.    
  
In dreams it was the worst.  You held him through the long cold nights, until he was hot enough to sweat, and he thanked you every morning, that pure smile on his sinful lip — he never knew the filth your poisoned brain poured out in the nighttime —  
  
down the filthy alleyway  
  
knelt down on his knees  
  
begging, choking for your cock  
  
— like you weren’t the one who was gagging for it.  You knew the truth, and you had to run.  It hurt you to hurt him, but if you didn’t bark a laugh, drink too much, and fuck whatever skirt would lift, you knew you’d ruin everything, take him down with you.  
  
But then, at seventeen, you won.  His mother died, he had no choice, he had to let you take him in, it was that or starve or die of exposure. You had him, god, you had him at last.    
  
It made you sick to think how death had sold him to you on a platter, like Salome’s horrid prize.    
  
You sold yourself that day.  Not just to take him in, with brotherly lies and a traitor’s arm — but later, after his grief had worn him out, you went out into the night, to the darkest place in town, and you found a likely john, a sailor on leave for a day or three, and you gave it up for a few crumpled dollars —  
  
you bought him a steak the next day and watched his white teeth chew  
  
you could never hate him  
  
but you hated him, loved him, it tore you in two,  
  
how much it corroded you, acid, the love that ate at you, sharks in the belly.    
  
Seventeen, he was so beautiful, gold,  
  
and you were a heap of rust.    
  
===  
  
You go out by night, trotting down forbidden streets, shadows bleeding like switchblades.    
  
Stalking the night like a hunter, you are the prey, turning your belly up for the savage stroke,  
  
then He steps out of the shadows, swirling through neon-red-stained mist.    
  
“Let me buy you a drink,” he says, and god, you never dreamed a man like that could walk the earth —  
  
where your boy was fresh and sweet, this man is silken cool.    
where he flowed like liquid light, this man burns like a molten fire.    
where he was tiny and fine, this man is big, his muscles are eloquent.    
  
The mouth is just the same but it sucks at yours, trying to drink you in, the mouth you’d never thought you’d kiss —  
  
and then he calls you by name  
and you fall back  
and this is a dream, a nightmare, it has to be a dream —  
  
“Bucky, please,’’ Steve says.  
  
how did you find me  
how did you know  
how did you get so big  
  
“Whaddaya mean please, I’m the one who begs,” you say.  
  
“You don’t have to beg, not with me,” Steve says, too big, too perfect.    
Where’s that little punk who tears your beating heart right out?  
  
“Just tell me what you want,” Steve says.  
  
what you want  
what you want  
  
you want to lie down in the mud and kiss those fine boned feet  
you want him to walk all over you  
  
you want to lie down in his bed and let him have you  
whatever way he wants it  
  
you’ve sold yourself like a sack of potatoes just to keep him fed  
and you’ve relished the burn that reams you out  
cleans you out but never good enough for him —  
  
“Okay, then I’ll tell you what I want,” he says, this giant version of your beautiful boy.  “I want to touch you, like this,” Steve says, and his big hand is just the same,  
  
his hand comes up and you close your eyes,  
you still see his luminous skin, you imagine how smooth it will feel,  
and the big hand closes in, soft against your cheek, and you fawn, you can’t help it—  
  
years stretch out in front of you,  
freezes and thaws, fire and blood,  
never the touch of a gentle hand, no never,  
only the slap —  
  
but you don’t think of that now, in seventeen, you offer yourself,  
your body is all you have to give.  
  
“fuck me” you whisper  
  
“I’ll take care of you, Bucky, I swear,” he says.    
  
You’re back in the room where you held that boy.    
  
The man he’s become glows like a sun, revealing the paltry flaws of the place.    
  
“I wish,” he says.    
  
“Tell me what you wish,” you say.  Your whole life has been one long series of unanswered prayers, but at least he can say it out loud, whatever it is he’ll never be given.  
  
“I wish no one ever touched you but me,” Steve whisper into your ear.    
He holds you, not dancing, just swaying to music shivering unsung in the air.    
“I wish I’d been brave enough back then to roll in your arms, and kiss you like I wanted.  
“i wish I’d just been brave enough to say, I love you, Bucky, when it was so true it was all I could breathe.  
“I wish it hadn’t taken us so long to get here, so many lost years, so much pain.”  
  
“Yeah, beggars might ride, huh Stevie?” you say.  
  
“Uh-huh,” he agrees.    
  
“Let me kiss you, can I?” he says.    
  
And of course he can so you say yes.  
  
His lips aren’t skilled, he’s bad with his tongue, you can tell he’s never kissed anyone like this, ever.  
You know how.  You’ve had a lot of practice, out on the street, selling and punishing yourself.  
  
You open up soft and hear him groan.  It’s not the nasty selfish groan of a john.  Let’s make no mistake, you weren’t desperate for the money. Your pa paid you well enough down at the garage.  No, you turn tricks cause of the terrible thoughts in your head, the things you want to do to him, and you want other men to do it to you so you won’t be tempted.  It doesn’t work like that.  The worse the men use you the more your traitor brain tells you how he’d be different.  
  
And oh, god damn it, he is.  He’s so different.  The gentle hands, the way he soothes you like a frightened animal (how many years have you been, will you be, no more than a feral terrified animal), the way he kisses you, mumbles sweet words, the way his lips pull at yours begging you to teach him how.    
  
“Teach me how,” he says, like he’s reading your mind, and maybe he is.    
  
“How are you here,” you say.  
  
And he pauses, and pulls back a little.  “I’m in your head,” he says, and somehow you know he’s telling the truth.  “I’m trying to help you get past seventeen.”  
  
The heaven and hell of seventeen, the year you first had him and knew, you’d never ever really have him.  
  
“You got me now, Bucky, I swear,” he says, his big blue eyes that never learned how to lie.  
  
“What do you swear,” you demand.  
  
“Whatever you want?” he offers.  
  
“I can’t ask you for nothing,” you say.  
  
“I’ll give you everything,” he counters.  
  
You can’t say anything.  
  
“Body, mind and soul.  Heart and liver and kidneys.” He jokes, but he means it.    
  
“Mouth, hand, thighs, asshole,” he says, red faced and honest.  “Tits if you like that sort of thing.”  
  
“I liked you when you were scrawny,” you say.  
  
“Sorry,” he blushes, again.    
  
“No, hey, I like this you just as much.” You could never not adore him, it’s carved in your bones.  
  
“Bucky, listen.  I know this is just a dream. We can’t really change the past.  But what we can change is what we do right now.  I’m in your head.  It’s not real.  But it can feel just as real.  It can be real in every way that matters.  When I was seventeen I was too fucking dumb to see what was right in front of me.  But I’m looking now, and believe me, I love what I see.  I  love you, Bucky, always have and always will, no matter what happens, what other men do, what they make you do, what you think you have to do.  I just want to take it all away, all the terrible things, and make it all good for you now.  I wanna make lt good for you forever.  Please Bucky.”  
  
Once he gets rolling, it’s impossible to stop him.  You just gotta let him let it out.  But really, you don’t even want to stop him.  You just want that voice to roll over you like righteous thunder, proud and unstoppable.  You want to be whatever he needs you to be, and right now, he’s saying he wants you just like you want him, always has, always will.  
  
Ain’t you a couple of idiots.  
  
“Well, I’d have to be stupid to turn down Captain America.  But you know, I am kind of stupid. The one I always wanted was Steve Rogers.”  
  
“You got him, Bucky.”  
  
You fall back into his arms and he’s strong enough to catch you.  Sometimes you have your own two arms, sometimes that whirring metal thing, sometimes only one.  It don't matter, he always catches you.    
  
You lay there on the bed from another century, the bed you shared like brothers so many years ago, and you’ll admit it now, you were never brothers.  A man doesn’t turn himself into to a whore because of the way he feels about his brother.  You love him.  Just letting yourself think it feels like a perfect bath, slipping under, letting the water wash everything away, and you come up, and breathe, and the air is sweet, and everything is fine.  
  
Steve is so good to you now.  He holds you, and kisses you, and strokes the tension out of your body.  He kisses over every part of you, nibbling your neck, suckling your nipples till they sting, and you’re hard as diamonds and soft like water.  He eases you open, so slow and sweet, and gets you slick, and then he slides in, and you never felt anything like it, not in all those times.    
  
He’s no stranger, he’s your Stevie, you’ve loved him your entire life, for longer than you’ve known what it means to love.  He moves inside you, so careful, watching you, thrusting to make you feel good, panting when he feels you begin to lose it.  He puts you first — it’s not about him — and anyone who’s ever taken you by force falls away in this moment — the only who matters right now is Steve, and he loves you, and he wants you to feel good.  
  
And god, you do.  You feel so good. You forgot what it feels like, feeling good, and anyway you know you never, ever, felt this good.  Steve inside your mind, Steve inside your body, Steve with his big hand wrapped around your cock, treasuring you, pleasuring you… waiting for you to come—  
  
“Come for me, Bucky, come on,” Stevie says, so stubborn, gritting his teeth —  
  
a sight so familiar, those clenched white teeth, tips you over,  
and fire pours through your whole body,  
fire pours through your mind,  
igniting the memories until they burn clean.    
  
seventeen was the year you first really had Stevie, and he had you  
  
you don’t question the magic  
  
you just let it heal you  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two songs by lady rockers inspired this chapter:  
> [Edge of Seventeen,](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dn8-4tjPxD8) by Stevie Nicks,  
> and [I Love Rock and Roll,](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xL5spALs-eA) by Joan Jett.  
> They are definitely not period pieces from Steve and Bucky's day, but rather, pretty much show my age!! You do not have to listen to them or even like them to get the feel of this chapter; I just mention it incidentally that I think it's interesting that not one but two lady rockers have songs in tribute to the beauties of a 17 yr old boy... Also, I am happy to say that I snagged the man I married when he was *almost* seventeen, and here we are almost thirty years later!!


	10. Rusted

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve, Sam and Wanda work out how to go after the next trigger.

RUSTED  
  
Wanda taps her fingers nervously against her coffee. “I found the imagery nexus of the next trigger,” she says.  “But I’m not sure what to do about it.”  
  
Sam looks from Wanda to Steve and back again.  “So we’re just gonna form a committee and hash through Barnes’s issues, right here on the street in a Wakandan cafe.”  
  
“Hey, the palace medical wing has perfectly good coffee,” Steve says.  He’s a hair’s breadth from bolting back to the palace.    
  
“So not the point,” Sam interrupts.  “Confidentiality?” he asks, looking between them.  
  
“You already know all this stuff,” Steve says.  
  
“From your perspective,” Sam objects.  
  
The stubborn blank look fills Steve’s eyes. “What’s the difference?” he challenges.  
  
Sam swings to Wanda, but then sees the same flat affect. “Oh, okay.  You know what? You’ve never been through any therapy either, have you, even though Hydra _changed you at the cellular level_.”  
  
She lifts one shoulder minutely and lets it drop.  “In Sokovia we say, ah, same shit, different day?”  
  
Steve actually laughs.  “We say that too.”  
  
Steve and Wanda grin at each other for a minute, and Sam has to take a moment to remember how young Steve really is.    
  
Sam tries the direct approach.  “How is Bucky gonna like it when he wakes up and finds out I been all up in his business. Dude already hates me.”  
  
“He doesn’t hate you,” Steve begins, frowning.  
  
“He doesn’t hate you, or anyone,” Wanda says.  “He’s just so tired of always being on guard.  He’s sick of fighting and being made to fight.  He looks at you and he thinks, this is a man who chose to fight.  You chose to go back into battle, to fight beside Captain America.  Honestly, I think Sergeant Barnes is torn — he knows the man he used to be would have chosen to fight beside his Captain without a moment’s hesitation — but now, that hesitation is real.  He doesn’t want to fight, and time after time, he has to.”  
  
“They just keep dragging him back in,” Sam says, shaking his head.  “But I see what you mean.  I represent a real point of conflict for him.”  
  
“Yes,” Wanda says.    
  
“But what about the trigger,” Steve says, impatiently.  
  
Sam rolls his eyes.  “I really wish you would take this confidentiality issue a little more seriously…”  
  
Steve locks eyes with Sam, and Sam feels the full weight of all Steve’s sincerity drop with a thump onto his shoulders. “Sam, there’s no one I trust more than you with Bucky’s well-being. I appreciate that you have concerns, I really do, and I owe you and Wanda so much for helping me and Bucky, in a way we’ll never be able to repay.  Talking these things out with you is not just a matter of convenience to me.  You and Wanda are my teammates.  I trust you with my life. In this situation I have to trust you with Bucky’s too.  It may help ease your mind to know that Buck gave me his power of attorney before he went into the tank.”  
  
“Okay,” Sam nods, still uneasy.  “That’s good.  I hope Barnes will feel the same way when he comes out.”  
  
“The sergeant has been at the mercy of very bad men for decades,” Wanda says.  “He can begin to rebuild his privacy once his brain is less of a minefield.”  
  
Steve sighs heavily.  “So, the trigger.”  
  
“Yes,” Wanda says.  “The word is Rusted.  The imagery is very deep and cavelike, it’s very still and silent.”  
  
“Go on,” Steve says, wanting to picture it in his mind. “What’s it like?”  
  
“Imagine you go down into a cave, and the walls are slick and rust-red, like in a cavern rich in iron oxide. Pools of rust red water stand still as mirrors on the floor. The air is thick, heavy, moist, and smells of rusty iron.  The ceiling is low, too low to stand.  You crawl along on hands and knees through rust red tunnels, clay mud clinging to your clothes. It’s not cold like most caves.  It’s hot and cloying as you sweat and try to breathe.  The only thing you can hear is the dripping of water from the rust red stalactites, and the harshness of your own breathing.  If you lie still the walls seem to close in around you, so you have to keep moving. Eventually, though, you’re just too exhausted to keep going.  You collapse in the rust red mud, wet and hot, clogged all over with heavy red clay.  It weighs you down.  The walls shrink in tighter.  The heaviness of the earth above you presses down.  You can’t move, you can’t breathe, the red light dims to darkness…. “  
  
“Stop!” Sam hisses, panting.  His fingers press into the edge of the cafe table, trying to remind himself he’s outside, in the open, free under the bright Wakandan sky.  “Jesus. Are they all like that?”  
  
“Yes,” Steve says.  “Or worse.”  
  
“But what is it?” Wanda says.  “I can see the trigger, but I’m not sure what it is.”  
  
“I know what it is,” Steve says wearily.  
  
“What?” Sam asks.    
  
“It’s the blood,” he says simply, and they get it.    
  
All the blood the Winter Soldier has shed has seeped down into this subterranean cavern in his mind: the guilt of every kill, all his successes, his satisfaction at being the fist of Hydra, bringing Hydra’s order to the world.  
  
How can Steve counteract that? Nothing can change the fact that Bucky killed at least three dozen people,  probably more.  Maria and Howard Stark were among them, and Bucky remembers them all.    
  
Sam ponders the problem.  “It’s the classic soldier’s dilemma,” he says.  “I mean, Barnes has it much worse.  But it is the same problem: if killing people is wrong, but you have to obey orders and do your duty, how do you deal with the guilt when you’re ordered to kill?”  
  
“As a soldier, you fight because the other side can’t be allowed to win,” Steve says. “That’s what kept us going.  We didn’t know anything about the individual German soldiers we were fighting, but we knew that Hitler had to be stopped, so the men we killed, in a way, didn’t die in vain.  They had to die in order for the Third Reich to be defeated.”  
  
“That’s an interesting perspective,” Sam says.  “I never heard it put quite that way before — they didn’t die in vain.”  
  
“That’s how I thought about it,” Steve says.  “It’s pretty weird, I guess, but it helped me cope.”  
  
“Hm,” Sam says.  
  
“When Hydra sent Bucky to do their dirty work, they had to make him believe those targets were a threat to the better world Hydra claimed it was trying to create.  I’ve read the file, how they deliberately made Bucky believe Hydra was doing the right thing, so that they could justify his kills to him in his own mind, what was left of it.”  
  
“Motherfuckers,” Sam says, and Wanda leans past Sam to spit on the sidewalk.  
  
“Yeah,” Steve nods, sadly. “When Bucky found out the truth, he was overwhelmed by guilt.  As enemies of Hydra, many if not most of Bucky’s targets had great potential to benefit humankind.”  
  
“So how do you convince Barnes that the blood isn’t on his hands?” Sam asks.    
  
“I don’t think we can,” Steve says. “I killed men myself, in combat during the war.  It’s not something you can just sweep under the rug.  It stays with you.”  
  
“You must acknowledge those deaths,” Wanda says softly. “Those people who died were human beings, with friends and loved ones. If Sergeant Barnes feels sorrow and regret for the lives he took, he should be allowed to grieve those losses.”  
  
“That makes perfect sense,” Sam says.  “We might never be Avengers again, but maybe we can work together as counselors.”  
  
“Maybe,” Wanda says, inclining her head.    
  
“Okay then, Steve, it sounds like you have a little homework.”  
  
Steve nods grimly.  “Times like these, I still wish I could just ask Jarvis.”  
  
“You haven’t checked out wakandanet?” Sam asks, agog.     
  
“No…” Steve says.  
  
“Unbelievable!”  
  
Wakandan internet doesn’t have the companies and interfaces that Steve is used to, but it’s much faster and much more efficient.  Steve doesn’t try to understand it, but he asks the interface his questions, and soon he has the results.    
  
Because the Soldier had been so hard to track, the list of his victims has always been provisional.  It’s a little longer since Natasha dumped the Hydra files online, but even now the list of names, with a few basic facts about each person (dates, nationality, profession, most notable achievements) barely takes up three pages — but the loss to humanity is immense.  
  
“Every life lost is a tragic loss to humanity,” Wanda reminds them.  Steve has to remember that she and her twin were so scarred by warfare, even before the Ultron debacle destroyed a huge chunk of their country, that they volunteered to join Hydra.  Wanda isn’t what Steve would call a pacifist, but she’s been deeply affected by lives lost in conflict.   He understands why the loss of the Wakandan delegation hit her so hard, even though their blood was on Rumlow’s hands, not on hers.    
  
“How are you gonna do this?” Sam asks.  
  
“Wanda will have the list, and read it to him, and I’ll try to be there for him,” Steve says.  
  
“That makes sense,” Sam says.  “Remind him that he isn’t to blame.  And when he gets better, he can think about how he might conceive of making amends.”  
  
Steve nods, and closes his eyes as Wanda reads over the list of names.    
  
Steve opens his eyes and he’s with Bucky inside the rust red cave.  Bucky is covered head to toe in his tactical gear, but it’s not black anymore.  It’s all stained, rusted red with old blood.  His left arm, the arm Iron Man blew off in a blast of repulsor fire, is still attached in this dream, but it’s rusted solid, caked with mud and blood, the metal pitted and flaking, like the fender of an old car, long abandoned.    
  
Bucky is lying on his back in the mud, puddles here and there around him. Red mud spatters across his face, his goggles and mask, clumping in his hair.    
  
Steve lies down beside him.  He doesn’t mind the squelching of the mud, and tries not to think about how, for Bucky, it’s a nasty, cursed mixture, more blood than clay.    
  
“For what it’s worth, Buck,” Steve begins, “I have a lot to say about you and culpability.”  
  
Bucky doesn’t say anything.  Steve would wonder if he was even breathing, but he can see the slow shallow rise and fall of Bucky’s chest underneath the tac gear.    
  
“You’re not culpable, because one, Hydra brainwashed you, and two, if they couldn’t use you they would have used someone else. You resisted them at every turn.  You can’t be held accountable for their agenda, and I’ll fight to the ends of the earth anyone who says otherwise.”  
  
The masked visage turns, regarding Steve.  
  
Steve reaches out with gentle hands, to pull off the goggles and mask that conceal James Buchanan Barnes behind the facade of a Soviet Hydra assassin.    
  
“I killed them, Steve,” Bucky says, and tears are running down his face.    
  
“I know,” Steve says.    
  
“It’s not okay,” Bucky says, choking.  
  
“No,” Steve says, “it isn’t.”  
  
“I didn’t want to,” Bucky says.  “I tried to get away. They wiped me and wiped me.”  
  
“I know,” Steve says. “That’s the whole entire reason we have to take out these triggers — so no one can ever do it again.”  
  
“The triggers were Lukin’s idea,” Bucky says.  “The first kills I made were before Lukin’s era.  It was Zola who perfected the wipe.”  
  
Steve grits his teeth so as not to lash out in a way Bucky definitely doesn’t need. “You can’t possibly be held legally accountable if your mind was so thoroughly wiped every time — not to mention the brainwashing and the torture.”  
  
“Well,” Bucky concedes.    
  
Steve moves to sit up, and the ceiling pulls away to give him a little room.  Bucky sits up too, and his arm releases, sinking down into the red clay, never to be seen again.  
  
“We can read all the names now,” Steve says,  “or we can stop whenever you get tired.”  
  
“Keep going,” Barnes says, tears rolling down his face.  “Read them all.  I want to know everything about them.”  
  
“Okay Bucky,” Steve says, and doesn’t realize he’s crying too.  
  
A small salt spring bubbles up in the center of the room, and runs away downhill, a tiny stream.  Neither man notices how the salt spring runs absolutely clear, not a trace of red.   


	11. Longing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve breaks through the final trigger.

Bucky hunches on his mattress with his back against the wall, knees crammed up against his chest. It’s the least restful position Steve can think of, that still involves a mattress.  The vigilance of the Winter Soldier is apparent in Bucky’s alert posture, the way his attention continually flickers up and out to the world outside his dumpy flat, from the tension in his shoulders, down to the boots on his feet.    
  
Steve sits down on the mattress next to Bucky, close but not touching, taking in the room — all gray and quiet, details crisp but colorless and drab in Bucky’s memory. Newspapers filter the windows, letting in a dirty light.  On the counter, a bowl of plums has gone off, over ripe, fruit flies orbiting, mold soft and white around the stems.    
  
Bucky has pulled back the floorboard; his black backpack gapes open on the mattress beside him. Leafing through his journals, he slowly turns the pages.  Steve sees mostly blanks, but peering more closely he notices solitary words inscribed here and there, like ancient graffiti: signs a memory once passed through.   
  
_bucky              brooklyn              bridge           smaller          invisible        end     line_  
  
The words twinge deep in Steve’s heart  — they must resonate in Bucky too or he wouldn’t have written them down like this, traced over and over like bruises in blue and black ink until they are thick and grooved down into the page  
  
On some pages are names from the list, the kills that have weighed on his soul for decades.  The grief is old, but most of the names are new to Bucky, names the Soldier didn’t need to know.   
  
Other words are in Cyrillic, Печь, Рассвет, ржaвый, желание, but Steve knows them only too well: the triggers.    
  
“Tell the girl she did a good job,” Bucky says. His voice is low and tired.    
  
“Tell her yourself,” Steve says, ready and aching for their old easy back and forth.   “You can tell a difference?” he asks, after a moment.   
  
“Yeah,” Bucky says, with an exhalation not quite relaxed enough to be a sigh.  “I mean, certain words, I can think them now, without that feeling of locking down.”   
  
“What, you couldn’t even think them before?” Steve asks.   
  
“Well, I could, but it was bad,” Bucky says.  “Like, ‘rusted’ — wow, there’s blood everywhere.”   
  
“Yeah,” Steve says.  “I get that. So, it’s better now?”   
  
“In a way,” Bucky says. “I don’t think that sequence of words will work anymore, to make the Soldier shut down and comply.”   
  
Steve shudders like he always does at all the despicable ways Hydra abused his best friend.   
  
“But the problems are real,” Bucky says, certain. “They’re still there.  No amount of wishful thinking is going to change the facts: I fell off that train, they made me into a weapon, I killed a lot of people.”   
  
The light outside the papered windows dims, and dulls to red.   
  
“This is the last trigger,” Steve says.  “Nine down, one to go.”   
  
“Like I said, good work,” Bucky says, beaten and blank.   
  
Steve feels a rising desperation as Bucky sits there, tightly coiled, but at the same time directionless, hopeless.    
  
“Make a wish,” Steve says, remembering how, as a kid, Bucky could go on for hours about what he’d do with a genie lamp or a magic quern or a talking fish.    
  
“No point, punk,” Bucky says, dropping the journal he’s looking through, red with a black star, or black with a red star, or red and black with stars all over.  “Wishing don’t change what happened.  I’m the Winter Soldier.  That’s a fact.  I can remember being Bucky — I mean, I can, but only in scraps and fragments.  I can’t really be him anymore. Who he was, it’s out of my reach.”   
  
Steve is already shaking his head.  “I don’t think so,” he denies.  “I can see him in you, right here, right now.  I know you been through hell —honestly, nobody could be the same after what you been through.”  
  
“So what’s the point?” Bucky says, heartbroken, begging Steve with his welling eyes. “Why are you even here?  The man you’re here for is gone, long gone — probably haunting that ravine in the Alps where he shoulda been buried.”   
  
“Bucky, listen,” Steve says desperately.  “We found each other, alive, after seventy years.  That has to mean something.”   
  
Bucky stares at Steve.  “No, it doesn’t.  Nothing ‘means something.’  We can’t just claim the good things ‘mean something’ and pretend the bad things are just hard luck.”   
  
“I’m no theologian,” Steve admits, “you know that.” Steve was a faithful Catholic, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t ranted at Bucky for hours when the ways of the Church didn’t sit right with him. “I’m just saying, it would be stupid for us to throw away a second chance like this.”   
  
Bucky looks up with a spark of hope.   
  
“I don’t know how much you remember about us taking out these triggers,” Steve says, “but I’m getting pretty used to laying it all out on the table.  I’m crazy about you, Bucky.”    Steve waits, heart pounding, for Bucky’s response.   
  
“I can’t accept that,” Bucky says, in a whisper.    
  
“Whether or not you accept it don’t change how I feel,” Steve says, “besides, I’m pretty sure you feel the same way.”   
  
“What if I do?” Bucky mouths, almost silent.   
  
“If you do,” Steve swears, “I will never leave you.  I will never give up on you.  I will fight on your behalf with everything I am.”   
  
Steve watches his words hit Bucky like a slug.  The weight of his sincerity can be almost too much to bear, even for Bucky.  It’s always been that way.    
  
“Steve,” Bucky begs, almost in a sob.  “They tore me to pieces.  So many times.  I can never be the man I was.  The things I’ve done, horrible things, I’ll never be able to even begin to make amends.  How could you bear to be around me?”   
  
“That ain’t the question,” Steve says. A flood of emotion swells through Steve, overwhelming even to himself.  “The question is, the one I asked myself a million times since the day I thought you died — how can I get through one more minute without you?  I swear to God, Buck.  I talk to you in my head. Every little thing that happens, I see it through your eyes.  I’m sorry.  I’m not trying to make it all about me.”   
  
“Punk,” Bucky says, rolling his eyes.  “When has it ever been about anyone but you?”   
  
Steve turns red, and tears tumble down his cheeks, and he can’t breathe any better now than he could when he was eleven.  Bucky’s hand comes up and automatically thumps Steve on the upper chest to help loosen his overactive bronchi, just like he’s always done.   
  
Steve grabs Bucky’s hand and holds onto it like a lifeline.  “I’m sorry about the arm,” he chokes through his sobs.    
  
“Yeah,” Bucky says, “dreams are nice.” He has his own two hands right now, the left hand just the same as Steve practiced drawing so many times over the years.    
  
“Bucky, I love you,” Steve says. “I know it’s gonna be hard.  I don’t care.  I just want you, I need you in my life.”   
  
“One good thing,” Bucky says, putting the journals back in the backpack and zipping it closed, “you can remember the stuff I can’t.”   
  
“You bet,” Steve promises, still clinging to Bucky’s hand.    
  
“All these journals,” Bucky says,  “all the time I spent trying to get things straight.  Most of em are blank….  like I’d get a little bit of something back, and go to write it down, and only a tiny fragment would stay long enough for me to capture.  Like when you have a word on the tip of your tongue.  That feeling that it’s stuck right there just on the other side.”   
  
Steve nods, pressing Bucky’s dear, lost hand to his lips.    
  
“I admit it,” Bucky says, staring at Steve’s lush mouth. “There’s a lot I want, but nothing I want more than you.”   
  
"Then have me," Steve says, and lifts his face, force of habit, because in the dream he’s little, the way he’s spent most of his life, and Bucky wraps him up in those strong, proud arms, like Steve is something precious, like Bucky will never, ever let him go — and now that Steve is strong enough, he intends to return the favor.    
  
Steve is standing dazed outside the tank. Wanda is grinning her tiniest grin, Sam his biggest as he looks between them.  

"So," T'Challa says, after the Dora Milaje have notified him, "it seems it is time to wake your friend up."

"Yes," Steve says, "it sure is."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is not over!
> 
> I'd love to hear what you thought of the triggers. Did they play out like you thought? did you have a fave or least favorite?


	12. Bucky wakes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky comes out of cryo, and Steve has to read him the triggers.

The red book with the black star on the cover was one of the filthiest, most repulsive things Steve had ever touched.  Just looking at it filled him with revulsion; to actually pick it up and read from it made his stomach seize queasily. If he had still been his old self, he’d be bent over the toilet right now for sure.    
  
Instead, he held the vile book in his hands and tried to look confident.  T’Challa, fully suited as the Black Panther, stood next to him, with Sam and Wanda also present.  If Bucky’s triggers were not truly undone, the former Avengers and the mystical defender of Wakanda would join forces to make sure he did no harm.    
  
“You have to do it,” Bucky insisted as soon as he was thawed enough to speak.  “Lock me down and read them.  That’s the only way to know for sure.”  
  
“Wanda says,” Steve began, but Bucky’s eyes flashed with angry determination.    
  
“Don’t tell me what she says, or what the Wakandans say, or what anybody says.  Read the triggers, or put me back in cryo and leave me there, Steve!”  
  
Steve felt mired in a swamp of regret.  Why had Bucky been made to suffer through such horrible things? Why was the human mind made in such a way that it was even possible to shut it down with a vicious set of triggers?  Why in the world would anyone take advantage of someone this way, forcing them to surrender their volition, to become a mindless killing machine?  And why, oh why, had it happened to Bucky, one of the best men Steve had ever known?  
  
None of his questions mattered anymore.  None of them could ever be answered.  The only way out was through, Steve knew that.  Wanda had assured him that the dissociative power of the triggers had been broken.  Using her uncanny abilities, she had inserted Steve into the complex of triggering ideas suggested by each word, and one by one they had helped his subconscious mind see a way out and through every trap instead of shutting down.  Steve hoped and prayed they had done enough. Everyone now was hoping for the best.  
  
Except of course, for Bucky, sweaty and gray with dread, who seemed like he wanted nothing more than to go back into the cryogenic chamber to close his eyes on all the world’s madness and sleep forever.    
  
Now, he was locked into a harnessing system made of heavy steel, heavier than the one he’d broken out of when Zemo triggered him.  He was breathing hard, trying to keep calm, but in his extremity his face looked dangerous and deadly.  
  
“Do it,” he said to Steve, who reluctantly nodded.  
  
Steve had practiced his Russian pronunciation until he was sure he had it right.  The triggers already haunted his dreams — knowing them in Russian was just a nasty bonus. There were no recording devices in the sound-proofed, reinforced room.  Only Bucky’s allies would hear them.  
   
But Steve would have to say them, if he could.    
  
He took a deep breath, and began, watching Bucky intently.   “Zhelaniye, rzhavyy, semnadtsat,” Steve recited.    
  
The series had to be spoken slowly and deliberately, with pauses, but without interruption.  Bucky had to close his eyes.  His breathing was harsh and heavy as he listened.    
  
“Rassvet, pech, devyat,” Steve continued. Bucky opened his eyes again, the pale blue irises almost entirely swallowed up by his panic-stricken pupils.    
  
Steve couldn’t ask him if he was okay.  He pleaded with his eyes for some sign, and Bucky stared back at him, terrified and resolute, insistent that the test be made.    
  
“Dobroserdechnyy, vozvrashcheniye na rodin,” Steve said.  His voice stuck in his throat.  Steve, Captain America, whose hacked voice memo reminding himself to buy milk had once gone viral — Steve choked out the penultimate word: “odin.”  
  
Bucky looked up at him, furious and panting, but still there.  Steve could do nothing but say it:  “Gruzovoy vagon.”  
  
Bucky held his breath, his eyes begging Steve.  Everyone in the room was on their toes, pumped full of adrenaline, waiting to see what would happen.    
  
“Ready,” Bucky whispered, and Steve’s heart jumped into his throat.  Sam and T’Challa leaned forward, and Wanda’s hands gleamed red.    
  
“— to get the fuck out of these restraints,” he choked, shaking with relief, half laughing, half crying, as Steve sprang forward and tore the restraints off his friend.    
  
“Bucky?” Steve said, hoping to God he’d never have to say his friend’s name in those querulous tones ever again.    
  
“Yeah, Stevie,” Bucky said, “it’s me.  What’s left of me anyway. The triggers didn’t take. You guys did it.”  
  
Steve had Bucky out of the restraints and into his arms, hugging and thumping him on the back.  Sam and Wanda hung back, and Bucky went to them, shaking Sam’s hand and kissing the back of Wanda’s.    
  
The King of Wakanda shook Bucky’s hand.  “Congratulations, Sergeant Barnes. This is truly a day of rejoicing.”  
  
“Yes, yes it is,” Bucky said.  “Thank you, so much, your highness, for everything.  I can never repay you.”  
  
“There is no need for repayment,” T’Challa insisted.  “The Sokovian accords were pushed through due in large part to  Wakanda’s influence, and we can see the damage they have wrought, not only to your team, but to the global peace keeping effort.  By breaking up the Avengers, the United Nations has torn apart one of Earth’s strongest forces for good.  I will continue to work on the international stage until the Accords are significantly revised, and you and your friends are cleared of all charges.”  
  
“I appreciate that,” Steve said.  “I don’t mean to be stubborn, but the Avengers have to be self-governing.  Sure, we want to be responsive to the UN and the World Security Council, but we can’t wait for their say-so when things go south.  Politics doesn’t work fast enough in this day and age.”  
  
“Besides, one of us is an actual god,” Sam said.  “No jurisdiction on earth applies to him — literally.”  
  
“I would also like to reassure you that the fate of the red book rests in your hands.  If your friends would like to study it, to see if it contains anything of benefit to you, by all means do so — otherwise you are free to destroy it.”  
  
Bucky held his hand up in a stop gesture, indicating Steve should keep the book. “Let Steve read it,” Bucky says.  “If it’s helpful, Steve will spot it. If not, we’ll get rid of it.”  
  
“There’s a section on maintaining the arm,” Steve said, “But that’s not very useful anymore.”  
  
“My scientists have fashioned a vibranium arm that you may try whenever you are ready,” T’Challa said.  
  
Bucky swallowed and looked down.  “That’s very kind,” Bucky said, “but I’m not ready for surgery right now.”  
  
“No surgery is required,” T’Challa said.  “It attaches to the existing socket, and is much lighter weight.”  
  
“Wow, okay,” Bucky said.    
  
“We are happy to help,” T’Challa said.  “Wakanda has always been independent, but in the past we have been too isolationist.  For the purpose of healing the breach between the Avengers, I am ushering my country onto the international stage.  I believe it to be a very noble cause.”  
  
“Thank you,” Steve said.  “Thank you so much for everything.”  
  
“Do not thank me yet,” T’Challa said.  “I doubt you are going anywhere for a while.”  
  
“You do have a point,” Sam said.  “I want to thank you as well.  We’d still be rotting on the Raft if not for your help, so thank you, very much.”  
  
“No problem, my brother,” T’Challa said, and Sam couldn’t help but grin.    
  
“You’re not going back into cryo, Bucky,” Steve said, a little shy.  “Want to get something to eat?”  
  
“Yeah,” Bucky said, “And you can tell me more about how you broke the triggers.”  
  
“Please, my friends,” T’Challa said, “Repair to the palace roof top gardens, and I will have my chef make anything you want.”  
  
Steve’s eyes lit up at the challenge.    
  
“Anything within reason,” T’Challa admitted with a chuckle.    
  
The King, the Captain, the Falcon, the Witch, and Bucky made their way to the roof, eager for the splendid repast T’Challa's staff provided.    
  
Steve looked forward to the meal, but even more, he looked forward to afterward, and being alone again with his best friend.  After all they’d been through inside Bucky’s subconscious, what would they allow to become real? Steve wanted it all.    
  
And Bucky stared straight in front of him, giving no sign at all about what he might want.  


	13. Bucky's journals

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky writes in his journal.

The Widow came today.  Guess it’s supposed to be some kind of olive branch.  I kind of imagined she’d turn up sooner or later, but I thought she’d be in disguise, like, dressed as a boy with short black hair or something.  Instead, there’s news footage of the Avengers quinjet landing on the tarmac, and then cut to T’Challa kissing her on both cheeks in the palace garden in front of the royal press corps.  
  
Steve says we’ll all meet for dinner together later, but she wanted me to have this right away — my backpack.  She got it back from Ross somehow.  I’d given up ever seeing it again, unless it was being used against me as evidence in a court of law.    
  
I’ll say one thing, if the olive branch is fake, giving me back my journals is an excellent tactic.    
  
===  
  
The dinner wasn’t that awkward.    
  
Steve gave the Widow the biggest hug.  Lifted her clean off her feet.  He’s so big now, he’s aces at giving massive hugs.

  
Sam and Wanda hugged her too. They were all so pleased to see her.  No one seemed to remember that she is a Black Widow, one of the most skilled intelligence operatives the world has ever seen.  She didn’t hug me.   She does seem familiar though.  I guess it’ll either come to me or it won’t.    
  
“James,” she said, and shook my hand, an overly delicate classy-fingered shake that sizes you up just as quick as a knuckle breaker.    
  
“Natalia,” I said, and tried not to let on that I hadn’t remembered her name until I said it. Ballerinas, hand to hand, a bullet cracking my goggles, spray of blood …  split second flashes, mysterious, too much to sort.  I breathed out and let it go.  
  
The dinner was good, some kind of poultry, Wakandan cuisine is a little spicy, a little bland, both at the same time.  Kind of like Brooklyn, somewhere between the Irish and the Italians.    
  
Steve was being so polite and the Widow was watching him like a hawk.    
  
“Pepper’s home,” she said.    
  
“That’s good,” Steve said, with a sigh.  “That’s real good.  How’s he been?”  
  
“Terrible,” she answered.  “But a little better now that she’s back.”  
  
“I wouldn’t want to be in her shoes,” Steve said.    
  
“You really hurt him,” she said softly, as Sam and Wanda cut their meat with fierce concentration.    
  
“It wasn’t about him,” Steve said.  “The Accords were bigger than any of us.”  
  
She nodded slightly, as if to say, they both knew very well all the reasons why rationality had fallen by the wayside.    
  
“I guess the way it’s working out now, is pretty much the way Tony said it would,” Steve allowed.  “Wakanda is leading the effort to revise the Accords, to make them more workable for us.  Maybe I should have just signed.”  
  
Natalia shook her head. “No, you were right.  You can’t sign if you don’t agree.”  
  
And they went on like that, dancing around topics.  Natalia watched Steve, and Steve looked back.  I  am pretty sure they’re not fucking.   She didn’t go back to his room after dinner, so there is that.    
  
I was relieved, I have to admit. I’m confused about what Steve and I should be to each other, but I know enough to realize that I don’t want to lose him to anyone else.  I remember what close quarters we used to live in, how it made life worth living just to have him close. …  
  
Getting rid of the triggers helps so much when I’m writing all these things down.  Used to be, I’d try to remember something, and stumble over one of the triggers in my mind, and everything would come crashing to a halt, like a mirror breaking, the pieces landing scattered across the floor: the image they used to reflect is gone.  Sometimes the trigger would propel me into some kind of nightmare — sometimes I’d dissociate completely and wake up later, not even knowing how much time had passed.  So a lot of my memories were jumbled, and a lot more wouldn’t make sense, because the key to understanding them was locked inside a trigger.  
  
Steve is the key to so much of who I am.    
  
===  
  
Big announcements today.  
  
First, T’Challa’s efforts with the UN are starting to pay off. The United Nations has released a draft revision to the Accords.  Signatory countries now have their chance to respond, and sometime soon, they’ll vote.  
  
He also told us that if the revisions pass, we should no longer be considered fugitives — even me, he said.  A special task force had reviewed my file and decided unanimously against pressing charges, due to the extenuating circumstances (torture, brainwashing, all that fubar shit).    So now, we just need the revisions to pass!  
  
Then, Natalia told us that Tony wanted Steve and the others to come back to the states and join up again as a team as soon as the UN vote went through.  Steve frowned and crossed his arms, the way he always does, but then he sighed and I could see he was trying to let it go.    
  
“Tell Tony thanks,” Steve said.  “I think we’d all love that.”  
  
Speak for yourself, I thought, but I didn’t say it.  T’Challa says I can stay here as long as I want.  
  
===  
  
Steve says I’ve been quiet since Nat came to visit.  
  
I shrug.  “Just thinking,” I say.    
  
“Bout what?” he says.  
  
“Nothing,” I say.  Your fine ass, I don’t say.  Your sweet lips.  The way your eyelashes fan down onto your cheeks.  The way your voice gets all deep and loud when you believe in something.    I’m thinking about all that.  The way I use to hold you in winter, pretending I was only trying to keep you warm. The feel of your big hand on my shoulder.  The weight of your eyes on me when you think I don’t notice.    
  
===  
  
I’ve had a surprising amount of success working back through these journals.  It’s so weird to look back and find the places where I’d get stuck on a word, and just couldn’t get past it.  Now that the triggers are gone, I can really think again, whereas before I was living in a labyrinth, where I could turn around some corners, but not the ones that would get me out. Now I can make my way in and back out in whatever way works.  It’s such a relief.  No matter how terrible the memories are, it’s better to be able to face them, than to know they are there but not be able to think about it.      
  
===  
  
I guess I didn’t mention how I have my own suite in the palace as a royal guest.  The palace is vast: some of it is rooftops and walkways and views, but most of it extends down underground.  T’Challa’s staff actually asked me about my preferences before they assigned me a suite.  I wanted to be near Steve, and the only other thing was that I really wanted to be able to see the sky.  I didn’t figure out for a while that Steve volunteered to leave his more spacious quarters underground for smaller rooms with a view of the sky, so our rooms could be closer.  I probably  should have guessed.    
  
Anyway, our rooms have a communicating door.  Steve told me I could lock it on my side if I wanted to.  
  
“No,” I said.  “I’d rather keep my side unlocked.  But you can lock your side, in case you’re worried.”  
  
“I’m not worried,” Steve said with a frown, and lifted his chin at me. That little punk don’t have the sense god gave a two by four.    
  
But I was glad the door stayed unlocked, and in fact, it was usually open, and his sitting room was where we’d sit to read, and mine was where we’d sit to eat and look out at the trees, under the bright blue African sky, or at night we’d look at the stars, so bright in Wakanda it’s like you could reach up and grab them.  Brooklyn boys like us never saw stars like that, until we were at war, and back then, at night, it was best to get some shuteye if you could, and stay under cover, and keep your eyes peeled for enemies in the darkness if you knew what was best for you.  
  
===  
  
Sometimes we just talk.  That’s what I like best these days.  I’m catching up on all the things I missed, and that’s great and all, but best is talking with Steve about things I remember, back from before.  I spent two years on the run from Hydra and Shield and just about everyone, trying to piece my mind and my life back together, but I couldn’t because of the triggers.  They had me scattered, locked into boxes; the things that really mattered to me, everything most important, was all the stuff the triggers had shut down.  I don’t really remember what Steve and Wanda did inside my head — it’s like you remember flashes of a dream.  None of it makes sense. Spiraling down into Hell? The Book of Daniel retold as a Hydra fable?   My dad being a grade A jerk? (He was that sometimes, but mostly he was all right.)  I don’t understand what all that shit was, and I don’t really want to, but whatever it was, its power over me is broken.  Now I can begin to work things through.    
  
I have a therapist now, and we meet three times a week.  She’s the best.  She was really impressed with the journals, that I was already trying to write things down and make some sense of it all.  She says I’m very articulate about my feelings.  I guess all those years with my trap locked up behind a muzzle gave me a chance to figure out what I wanted to say.    
  
The most important thing, she says, is to feel whatever I feel.  Not to blame myself for what I can’t change.  To make the most of now, and take steps toward the future I want to be in.     
  
What I feel.  Man, I am such a mess.  I feel hatred: I hate Hydra so much, the things they made me do, they things they did to me, the sense of worthlessness they tried to instill in me; the way they made me fawn like a dog.  I hate them, and I’m really glad Shield wiped them all out, otherwise, the urge to go on a rampage worthy of the Hulk would be nigh irresistible.    
  
Sorrow.  I’m fucking sad about so much.  I’m sad that Steve put his plane in the water and didn’t get to live out the life he deserved.  I’m sad about the things I missed: seeing men set foot on the moon, for example.  I’m sad about the things they made me do.  I remember how they brainwashed me into believing I was on the right side.  I’m so mad about that, and sorry for it all.  I want to make amends but I don’t even know if it’s possible.  I shaped the century, and now I’ve got the aftermath to face up to.    
  
Gratitude. Sometime it makes me fucking bawl to think how good I have it now.  Literally living the life of a king in a palace, working through my problems, free room and board, and Stevie right here with me.  
  
Stevie.  If he ever reads these journals (he can if he wants but I hope he doesn’t cause all the worst shit is in here too)  — if Steve sees the things I think about him he’ll turn so red.  He means so much to me.  I know I’m bad at showing it.  I can’t bear to let him know how much I want from him, even though it feels like he might want me too.  It feels good, in a way, to take it slow.  Just being next to each other, to look up and see his stupid face, and he looks up at me, and crosses his eyes and puts out his tongue like he always did, and then we start throwing the Gookie like Harpo, just like we always did.  God, it fills me up inside, when everything else is so bleak and wrong.   Steve gives me hope.  He has so much faith in me.  No matter what happens, I’ve got to live up to that faith.    
  
===  
  
Steve’s getting serious.  The other day he planned a date and took me out on the town.    
  
We dressed up nice, Wakanda style — it was a relief to see Steve in something other than a t shirt  — and went to a little cafe Sam likes.  Live music, great food, delicious drinks made of fruit we never heard of — and there was even a little dance floor.    
  
Wakandans social dance in groups or couples or by themselves.  There’s so much freedom here to do what you want.  I studied the way the couples moved and it seemed like a basic salsa would fit the music.  I remembered dragging Stevie out to the Puerto Rican clubs once or twice, but it was way too fast for him to keep up with back then.  Now, though…  
  
I stood up and gave him the eye, and held out my new Vibranium hand for the lead.  He blushed, but stood up and took it.    
  
I can’t describe how happy I was, how good it felt, to move him back and forth in our slot on the floor.  Nothing fancy, a turn here and there — it didn’t matter, just holding hands and watching him grin and try to follow my lead.  My god, it was like I was drunk, I felt so high.  I’m not sure that what I was feeling showed up on my face, but at least I can smile a little these days and when I do Steve lights up like a chinese lantern, glowing from inside.    
  
We danced till they closed the club.  
  
Next morning at breakfast, Sam laughed his ass off at Steve.  He’d tried so hard to get Steve out of the palace and into the city, and Steve wouldn’t budge.    
  
“Just waiting for the right partner,” Steve said, and Sam smiled and nodded like he knew what that meant.    
  
===  
  
He kissed me, and it was so good.  
  
There’s no way I could ever write it down, how good it was.    
  
“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for his love is better than wine.” That’s in the bible.  I remember it from reading in the pews when I got bored on a Sunday morning, and my ma would tsk and smile and let me read.    
  
I guess I never cared that much about wine, but Steve’s kisses make me higher than a kite, and if that’s holy, then I’m sure ready for church! It’s not just his lips, though they are fantastic.  It’s not just the taste of him, though it is good.  It’s not the way he smells — really good — or the warmth of him all around when he gets in close — though that is a big part of it.  It’s the way his arms closed in around me, the way his lips were so gentle and yet hungry and fierce like he couldn’t decide if I was breakable or need taking down — the way the angle of his mouth against mine set up a challenge and both of us were winners once we had it right — the way he laughed a little from sheer delight — and I mumbled “Stevie, stop it,” and it came out a whine, and he pulled me in tighter — the way it felt like he never wanted to let me go, but he would because he knew i had a lot to process before we move on to the next thing.    
  
The heat in his eyes when he left me at my bedroom door.    
  
The promise in the sway of his hips and the breadth of his shoulders, walking away down the hall, back to his own rooms…  
  
the dreams I had that night, of lying down for him…  
  
the shivery joy of being so sure of this one thing:  
  
the thing I want more than anything else:  
  
he loves me!  
  
I love him!  
  
We love each other!!!

Back in our day, it was practically a death wish to admit a thing like that.  And now, I wanna shout it from the rooftops!  But it's good enough, to smile to myself, and write it here, and see what happens next.   
  
This is taking it slow, and man, I like it.  


	14. Tony

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Several Avengers reassemble.

Tony stepped off the quinjet onto the tarmac, squinting in the bright sunlight under the African sky.  Wakandan air breathed like any other air — maybe a little humid, but fresh and clean.  
  
T’Challa stepped out to meet them.  He’d come personally to greet the Avengers with three of his Dora Milaje.  Tony remembered that one of them had once bested Natasha, so he was not about to make any false moves.    
  
Rhodey moved down the ramp slowly, but managing on his own.  He’d made great progress with his exo, gripping the handrail and barely limping. Vision was right behind him, ready to help in a split second if he should falter.  Natasha brought up the rear, eyes sharp as she surveyed the area.    
  
Everett Ross was still in Belgium as far as Tony knew, though he was more vocal on behalf of Wakanda every day.    
  
“Welcome to Wakanda,” T’Challa said, while his warrior maidens looked on sternly, towering over Tony.    
  
“Thank you, your majesty,” Tony said, bowing a little.  Vision, watching him, bowed the same amount.  Rhodey didn’t bow, but kept his military bearing, while Natasha strode forward and shared a double cheek kiss with the King.  
  
Tony thought about whistling, but wisely refrained.  
  
“It is a time of great celebration for Wakanda, now that the Avengers have agreed to establish a permanent base of operations here,” T’Challa said to Tony as they rode to the palace.  Tony was used to limousines, but this was more like a luxurious bus, seating all of them as comfortably as in the customized cabin of a private jet, moving silently and efficiently through Wakanda’s capital.  Clearly Wakanda was miles ahead with driverless electric vehicles, as with so many things.    
  
“After your very helpful intervention with the UN regarding the Accords, it seemed only logical to establish a base here,” Vision said.  “Avengers Tower has drawn fire, endangering the citizens of New York City in a way most regrettable, but Wakanda is more than capable of defending herself.”  
  
“Yes,” T’Challa said. “We look forward to a fruitful scientific exchange.”  
  
“As do we,” Tony agreed.  He felt a little redundant in the conversation.  There were a few awkward pauses that Natasha and Vision managed to cover.  T’Challa’s bodyguards remained alert and totally silent the whole ride, escorting Tony and the others into the Palace and showing them where to go.  They’d all been assigned rooms in one of the guest levels, underground in the Palace Compound, and took the time before dinner to freshen up.    
  
Tony arrived fashionably late, in a red silk shirt with gold embroidery, very expensive blue jeans, and hippy hand-painted red and gold shoes.    
  
Nat, with her hair up and makeup flawless, sent Tony a micro-frown from where she stood in conversation with T’Challa.   Every one was already mingling. Vision and Wanda were standing close and smiling at each other, the tall synthezoid slouching a little to be nearer to the powerful young woman. Rhodey and Sam were talking seriously in a corner. Cap and his bestie were on Nat’s other side, and Steve had positioned himself between his childhood friend and Tony.  It wasn’t like Tony was wearing repulsors right that second. Well, to be honest, it was very much like that.  But what sane man with miniaturized repulsor wristbands wouldn’t wear them into such a situation?  
  
“Tony, I’m so glad to see you,” Steve said, his stupid face noble and concerned.    
  
“Likewise, I’m sure,” Tony said, and held out his hand.    
  
Steve noticed the bands and shook anyway.  The recovering assassin behind him didn’t say anything.  
  
“Barnes,” Tony said, holding out his hand.    
  
Cautiously, Barnes lifted his eyes. God, he’d literally been averting his gaze.  How awful. He brought his right hand up and shook with Tony, but didn’t smile and didn’t speak.  Steve watched the whole exchange like an umpire at an archrivals little league match.  
  
The whole room let out a breath as Barnes shook with Tony and Tony stepped back.    
  
Steve resumed a protective stance somewhat between the two of them.  Natasha continued to frown.    
  
“Well, the gang’s not all here,” Tony said brightly. “Bruce sent me a letter, so at least he’s alive, but, it was a paper and envelope letter and he must have sent it by passenger snail, because it was dated last November.  Peter had a quiz in Health class… Haven’t heard a peep out of Clint or Scott since they mysteriously vanished from the world’s highest security detainment facility.”  
  
Steve bit his lip.  Natasha continued to frown in that tiny way you could only see if she wanted you to.  
  
“I am sure your friends are well,” T’Challa said, implying that he very well knew where they were, how they were doing, and how they had gotten there.    
  
“How’s Pepper?” Steve asked, awkwardly.  
  
“She’s fine,” Tony said.  “Fine.  She hasn’t burst into flames much recently at all.”  
  
“Good,” Steve said faintly, and he literally kicked the floor with the toe of his shoe like a kid.    
  
“Hey,” Tony said, “Can we just, can we,” and he stepped into Steve and hugged him.  Tony had never really hugged Steve before.  It was like hugging a big, friendly wall that smelled fantastic and gently hugged back.  
  
He stepped away again and looked back over at Barnes, who once again was looking down at the floor.    
  
“Hey man,” Tony said, arms out a little.    
  
“I ain’t gonna hug you,” Barnes said, not angry, just weary.    
  
Tony glanced at Steve, who said, “Bucky doesn’t really let people get in too close.”  
  
“Gotcha,” Tony said, making gun fingers, and then quickly holstering them.  “Wow, nice arm.  Good work there.”  
  
“Thank you,” T’Challa said.    
  
Like Sam and Steve, Barnes was wearing a long, loose shirt, Wakanda style, but his left arm remained deliberately bare.   The new arm was a rich metallic black, more seamlessly joined than the silver one had been.  On the shoulder was a silver star inside a blue ring.  Barnes had likened his own arm to his Captain’s shield.  
  
Tony’s heart, repaired so many times, thumped a little.  He knew what it meant to love someone.  He loved Pepper almost beyond tolerances.  Looking at Steve and Bucky through new eyes, he could see the truth of what they meant to one another.  If Tony were honest, which he hardly ever was, he knew what he would do if faced with a choice between Pepper and the world.  He would get as much of the world as he could cram into his fists, then go crawling back on elbows and knees to give it all to Pepper.    
  
Tony hadn’t done all that much in the past year except needle Thaddeus Ross and wheedle Everett Ross (apparently no relation—what was up with the dearth of surnames?) and try to win Pepper back on whatever terms she named.  Therapy — okay, he was more than ready for that, and he went, and he raged and cried, bargained, denied, and eventually accepted and felt a little better.  He saw the light about Barnes, and even regretted blasting his arm (he’d never even gotten to tinker with it).    
  
Thank God for Natasha, running interference between all sides, keeping in touch with Pepper, making nice with the nicer Ross and keeping the sovereignty of the superhero community foremost with the worse Ross, slinking back from Wakanda every month or so with a word or two of progress, when Tony was fit to hear it. Natasha was not only a spy, she was a world class diplomat when it came to revealing a few key things while keeping the larger part hidden. He knew she’d diverted funds to Scott and helped Clint keep his secrets, and really, he was grateful.  
  
Tony kept his hungry eyes off Barnes’s velvety black appendage, and before long they all sat down to supper. They seated Tony next to T’Challa and across from Natasha, and Steve next to her.  Tony found that he really enjoyed T’Challa’s company.  The man was not only a thoughtful and wise leader, he was also very clever, and he understood science and technology well above the layman’s level.  Tony looked forward to working with him, the first real enthusiasm he’d felt since Bruce had jumped into the ocean instead of coming home.    
  
Vision, meanwhile, was feasting his gleaming blue eyes on the Sokovian girl who’d sunk him into the depths of the earth.  And the witch, one of the most powerful enhanced humans Tony had ever seen or heard of, was blushing like a girl of her actual age.  Sam caught Tony’s eye and smirked, as if to say “kids these days.” Rhodey, on Tony’s other hand, kept Tony reined in, like always, and gave astute assessments on where the Wakandan defenses, already the best in the world, could still stand to incorporate improvements.    
  
Barnes sat next to Steve and the two of them kept up a silent exchange throughout the evening, the likes of which Tony had rarely ever seen.  Barnes even cracked a tiny smile once or twice, which made Steve light up like the sun.    
  
Before Tony knew it, the evening had come to a close, without insult, bloodshed, weapons discharge, sudden repulsor fire, or anyone getting thrown across the room by their face.  Natasha would return Steve’s shield to him sometime before morning, and Tony only hoped he’d be able to hear Steve’s girlish scream of joy.    
  
“Would anyone care for brandy, or the like?” T’Challa offered.  Natasha, Sam and Rhodey took him up on it.  
  
“I’ll walk Wanda back to her rooms,” Vision volunteered, stars in his eyes, almost brighter than the mindgem.  
  
“I’ll walk you back, rather,” Wanda said.  “I’ve lived here for months, you know.”  
  
“Ah yes,” Vision laughed, delighted with the world, and with Wanda laughing alongside him.  
  
Steve and Barnes were holding hands as they stood to take their leave. “Best to stick to our routine,” Steve said.  
  
“Old man,” Barnes ribbed him, with a tiny grin, and Tony could hardly bare to think about everything he’d gone through.  No more of that.  They left the room, joined at the hip, just the way his old man had always described.    
  
Tony sat with Natasha and the men for a while, then checked his watch and made his good nights.  
  
At 11 pm local, he hit the most important button on his Starkphone.    
  
Pepper answered on the third ring.  
  
“I hope I didn’t wake you,” Tony said.    
  
“I’m in the shower,” she said, and the mental image of her long lean limbs, all creamy and freckled, knocked him back for at least five seconds.    
  
“Lord, woman, how many hearts am I gonna go through?” Tony asked.    
  
“I don’t know,” she replied in her silky, smiling tones.  “I think the one you’re on now is pretty good.”  
  
“You are the best thing that has ever, or will ever, happen to me,” Tony said sincerely.  
  
“Hmm,” she said.    
  
“Oh!  You didn’t say it back!” he cried.  
  
“I love you,” she said, and she meant it, and that was all he needed to hear.  
  
“Lovebirds all over the place,” Tony said.  
  
“Vision and Wanda?” Pepper said.  
  
“Yes, but also, Rogers and Barnes.”   Tony was already running composite names for them in his head: Rogarnes? Bargers?  
  
“That doesn’t surprise me,” Pepper said. “I’ve always had my suspicions.”  
  
“But you knew Aunt Peggy!”     
  
“I met her,” Pepper amended.  “And she was incredible.  A few things she said, little hints about their friendship… she was very discreet of course, but I know she trusted me, and I guess it didn’t seem like such a deadly secret when they were both long gone.”  
  
“Yeah, and now they’re both back.”  
  
“It’s a miracle.  How did he seem to you?”  
  
“Bucky? Deadly as ever, very quiet, crazy in love with Steve…”  
  
“No, I meant Steve.  He’s been so sad the whole time I’ve known him.”  
  
“He’s still sad,” Tony said, reflecting, “but it’s lighter, maybe.  Like things could finally get better.”  
  
“Things are supposed to get better,” Pepper reminded him.  
  
“Are they?”  
  
“Yes,” she said.  
  
“You keep reminding me of that and I’ll do my best to believe it.”  
  
“Okay,” Pepper said, and the sun came up in New York City and warmed Tony’s scarred old heart from thousands of miles away.    
  
  
  



	15. the happy ending

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the happy ending!!

“I don’t like long speeches,” Steve said, “so I’ll try to keep this short. Thank you all so much for being here with us. It means so much, more than I can ever really hope to convey. It wasn’t so long ago that it felt like our world was ending… in fact that seems to happen to us a lot, right?” 

Laughter trickled around them and set Steve a little more at ease. 

“Where there’s life, there’s hope,” Steve said, “as my ma used to say; she pulled me back from death’s door enough times to know what she was talking about. She taught me never to give up hope, to stake my claim and never back down, whatever the odds. You might call it sheer cussedness… but my ma made sure I had the determination to survive.” 

Smiling faces seemed to approve Steve’s words. 

“There was one time I couldn’t see any way forward, and you all know what happened. I woke up in the future. Almost everyone I’d ever known was dead. I was alone. But I wasn’t alone, not really, because I still had work to do, and I tried to do it the best I could. Sometimes it seemed like my best wasn’t good enough. Then I found out I wasn’t alone after all. I found out my best friend was still alive. He’d been through hell, but he was still alive. And where there’s life, there’s hope.” 

Steve looked around. “I owe a huge debt of gratitude to everyone in this room. Sam, Natasha, Sharon, T’Challa, Wanda — you helped me bring him home. But all of you, really, gave us a home to bring him back to.” 

Tony bowed his head, and Pepper patted his hand. “Hear hear,” Tony said. 

Steve looked around at everyone assembled. “Even though we were deliberately torn apart by hatred and revenge, we’re all here, back together again, united in common cause and stronger than ever before. The revision of the Accords makes it possible for us once again to come together to defend the Earth in time of great need. Even though most of us have given more than anyone should ever be expected to give, we stand ready to defend humanity from any threat, internal or external, and for that, I am deeply grateful to all of you.” 

“But most of all, I’m grateful on a personal level, for your friendship. Thank you for working through a terrible time with us. We made it through to the other side.” 

Steve looked around and shook his head. “That’s all. Thanks for your friendship. Thank you.”

Everyone began to clap and Bucky stood up to kiss Steve on the cheek. 

“Let this guy sit down for a minute. Always with the speeches,” Bucky said. “I had a hard time thinking I deserved forgiveness, much less your friendship. Yet here we are. I doubt I can ever repay the debts I owe, but I’m here to say, I’ll surely try. Thank you for taking care of Stevie when I wasn’t around. He sure can pull some stupid stunts. But it means the world to me that he’s had good friends to watch his back.” 

Natasha rang her glass and stood up. “I’m not an easy person to get to know. But Steve was always ready to take my friendship at face value, and that means a lot to someone like me. Thanks, Steve, for being such a good friend.” 

She raised her glass and everyone toasted. 

“I also owe more than simple thanks to this man: without him I might not even be alive today. Spasibo, uchitel.” Natasha made eye contact with Bucky, and drank to him, and he lifted his glass in return, as everyone applauded. 

Sam stood. “I think we could all say good things til the cows come home. But I just want to say, that the way Steve never gave up on Bucky has been an inspiration to me. A royal pain in my ass, but also an inspiration. I’m proud to know Steve Rogers, and I’m glad I’m getting the chance to know Bucky Barnes.” 

“Can the happy couple dance already? I don’t know about you all,” Clint said, “but I think wedding receptions are for cake, and dancing!” 

Steve stood, with a shy smile, and Bucky led him to the floor. Big band music began to play. 

“Oh hell no,” Nick said to Maria, Sharon and Phil. “This song was playing when that guy shot me.” 

“Sorry, Nick,” Phil said. “It’s the song the soldiers played when they were reunited with their sweethearts.” 

Nick shook his head, glowering, but said no more. 

After the first dance, the floor quickly filled. Phil was a great lead, and danced with Sharon, Maria, Darcy, Pepper, and anyone else who looked interested. Peter Parker made up for Nick’s refusal to dance by dancing to every song, flailing around by himself with his eyes closed, yet he managed to avoid bumping into anyone even once. Clint’s wife Laura was there, along with their kids, who looked adorable in their dress up clothes. Bruce danced with Natasha, when she wasn’t dancing with Clint or Laura or the little Bartons. Even Scott and Hope were there, with Scott’s daughter, who soon joined in with Clint’s kids. Tony danced with Pepper, and doted on her the entire evening. Thor and Jane, in Asgardian regalia, swept around the floor when Thor wasn’t drinking or laughing with his friends. Rhodey was graceful in his newest exo, as he danced with Pepper several times. Vision and Wanda had eyes only for each other, though T’Challa danced with Wanda twice. T’Challa’s sister danced with Sam, who tried to seem like he wasn’t terrified, but ready to die happy. Sam spent most of the evening with Darcy, who danced with everyone at least twice, pulling Sam behind her as her new best friend. Darcy danced with Peter, making him turn so red that he looked ready to explode. Thor danced with Steve, a complicated dance with the two warriors standing back to back, and Steve laughed but somehow followed along as Bucky smiled and clapped. 

Steve and Bucky fed each other cake, and Clint cheered when it got on Steve’s nose. 

The champagne was the best that money could buy, and there was Asgardian mead in reasonable quantities. 

Darcy showed Thor and Vision how to carry Steve and Bucky around the room on chairs and beamed as they stomped on a wine glass. Thor embraced them both at once and kissed their cheeks with a loud huzzah. 

Finally the evening drew to a close and Bucky and Steve took the elevator home, down a few floors to their guest suite in Avengers Tower. 

“Married,” Bucky said, shaking his head happily.

“The old ball and chain,” Steve said with a grin. 

Bucky moved in and kissed Steve gently. “I owe you everything.” 

“You don’t owe me nothing,” Steve denied. 

“Well, I plan to spend the rest of my life paying you back,” Bucky said.

“I’ll take it,” Steve answered. 

They fell together, just as they had in dreams, but this time, it was real, and it was forever. On that perfect night, nothing else mattered but the love they shared, the love that joined their souls closer than flesh could ever be. They laid claim to one another, a claim that would endure as long as their enhanced bodies lasted — how long that might be, no one really knew.

They slept, entwined, at ease, full of gratitude and love. 

“Thanks for coming back to me, Bucky,” Steve murmured. 

“Thanks for bringing me back,” Bucky replied. 

Two contented hearts beat slow and soft, in peace, through the quiet night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A couple small notes:
> 
> The song for their first dance is ["It's been a long, long time" ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MU14NbQSE0A). It's a great song, but you can see why Nick wouldn't care for it any more. :P
> 
> The phrase Natasha says in Russian means, thank you, Teacher. (I hope!)
> 
> In my headcanon, Darcy is Jewish. I love Jewish Darcy!! (I also think Bucky is more likely to be Presbyterian...) At my wedding our Jewish friends carried us and it was wonderful!!
> 
> Steve isn't close friends with the Agents of Shield, so that's why Phil is there on his own. Besides it would be pretty awkward if Bobbi was like, to Clint, aren't you my other ex-husband? or if Daisy was like, to Bucky, aren't we in space?? :P My Sharon action figure arrived and she went straight to Avengers headquarters... she hasn't even said hi to Steve yet, they are too busy celebrating made-up holidays. 
> 
>  
> 
> thanks so much for reading! please let me know your thoughts!!!


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